


Proceed to Memory

by lurrel



Category: The Social Network (2010)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, Cyberpunk, F/M, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Infidelity, M/M, Recreational Drug Use, Spanking
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 20:51:33
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 30,047
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2322782
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lurrel/pseuds/lurrel
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In a world where most people have extensive cybernetic enhancements, Eduardo doesn't. Mark does, but he's intrigued by the only analog student at Harvard. And there's Facebook.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Proceed to Memory

**Author's Note:**

> A billion and one thanks to jibrailis for betaing this and walking me through some stuff, basically at the last minute. All remaining mistakes are all mine (edit to add that many of them have now been fixed!). Part of The Social Network Big Bang, so please check out the amazing art from my two wonderful artists: [illustrations from badsketches](http://badsketches.livejournal.com/43528.html) and a [great fanmix from princewardo](http://8tracks.com/princewardo/buy-it-use-it-break-it-fix-it). Thanks to y'all two for being wonderful and flexible!

**Harvard**

Mark knows Harvard is where he needs to be, but he hasn’t figured out why everyone _else_ is there too. They move slow, seem caught up in shit that seems petty -- clubs, dating, nice clothes. He’s there because it’s the best, and he’s going to be the best if he isn’t already.

He’s got some friends, other CS majors as plugged in as he is, and freshman year wasn’t a total waste. But he didn’t _make_ anything.

That’s going to change this year. He’s feeling pretty good about it. His roommates are alright, especially Dustin. The best part is, he’s wired too, so Mark doesn't have to explain the optical array he has almost constantly screwed onto his face, or the power source lump on his neck, or how he doesn't need headphones any more because he has something direct in his jawbone.

Chris is funny, social, gay, and only nominally wired - he's got a souped up smartphone that will Bluetooth interact with his basic implant behind the ear, that lets subvocal commands work, allows for silent calls. He could hook it to an optical piece if he wanted, but he normally uses a tablet. He doesn’t need headphones.

It's a nice rig for an English major, Mark will give it that. Mostly it means he won’t have to deal with Chris asking a thousand annoying questions about what he’s got in his brain.

Billy seems nice and glued to his sorority girlfriend, so Mark doesn’t think too much about him.

\--

Implants aren't uncommon in a school like Harvard -- parents are rich and want the best for their kids. Most of the other comp sci majors have some major tech upgrades, although a lot of them seem to opt for the skin covers that make the implants less obvious. 

Mark doesn’t give a shit. He’s got silver fillings in his teeth, he might as well have some protruding surgical steel around his temple. His rig isn't permanently socketed in; his mom wanted to make sure everything unscrewed. The screws, of course, are basically permanent, drilled into his skull, but those holes are easy to cover up, she said. Think about your wedding day, she said, you’ll want to look nice. You don’t want that stuck on forever.

In theory, she’s right. He only takes it off for fencing or swimming, maybe for bed if he remembers. His mom thinks it covers up his “handsome face,” but really it’s mostly clear, like a visor that either does a screen overlay or beams into his eyeballs directly. He hopes he can get a direct optic nerve hook-up someday, eliminating the bulky hardware altogether, but it does what it needs to do.

The only implant that hasn’t taken is the keyboard -- his hands have a few light scars and he has to use an actual external keyboard, but they make portable ones and it connects just fine with his brain, with his screen, with the processor in his neck. The neural implants sing in his brain, and there’s an LED under the skin at his temple that glows a dull blue when everything works as it should.

It’s nice to have something to do with his hands.

\--

Eduardo is the type of person who has trouble sitting still -- his knee is always bouncing under the table at dinner. His father has told him a thousand times that it makes him look too eager, immature

He is eager, though -- he likes Harvard because he’s unfettered by too much baggage. At Harvard, there is a mold he can refit himself into, one that he selects for himself.

At least that’s how he likes to idealize it. Mostly, Harvard is sitting in a club meeting, jittery, taking notes and outlining papers. The thrum of _not this_ and _keep moving_ courses makes him fidgety but also centers him. 

Sometimes it is hard to imagine what comes next.

\--

Mark isn’t there to do much socializing. Freshman year was about drinking, fucking around, and figuring out if he really needed to go to class. This year, he's planning on making Dustin into his best friend - at Harvard at least. He codes best with another brain to bounce off of and since Justin went to Stanford - not even an Ivy - he wants a new one. No one seemed sharp enough before but Dustin seems driven.

He doesn’t need a bevy of friends like Chris, though, or a collection of girls like Dustin wants. One would probably do, if that. It’s not a priority.

That doesn’t deter either of them from trying to get him "out."

“You guys should come to this party,” Dustin is saying when Mark takes a break from coding to get off the couch and grab a soda. “I met a guy who’s a bigger weirdo freak than Mark!”

Chris snorts. “What, does he have a third eye implanted? A cyborg arm?”

Mark wouldn’t mind a cyborg arm, to be honest, but he’s intrigued. There aren’t that many people who are more teched out than him on campus, or if there were, they were the kind of people that cared about not looking like a total robot. 

Mark really doesn’t give a shit about that.

Dustin grins. “I wish! Chris, you should probably get one of those installed as soon as you can. But no, I saw him at the frat meeting and he looks totally clean. Just skin."

Mark frowns. He’s got a screen overlay happening -- his CS homework is compiling over Dustin’s face, a little light shining it straight into his retinas, but now he’s really interested.  
“He could just be rigged up in stealth. Most people here are.”

“No, this guy was definitely totally unplugged. No wires in, no jacks, no sockets. Dude was totally clean -- could probably walk through a metal detector without setting it off.”

“He could have a skeleton coated in adamantium,” Chris says idly from the couch. He’s reading something, highlighting big paragraphs of text seemingly at random on his tablet’s screen.

“Okay, he could be a mutant, I guess, but he’s definitely not a total cyborg like Mark or me here.” Dustin rubs the lump on his head where a processor lives. Mark doesn’t have one straight implanted in his brain yet; it’s risky. Dustin doesn’t seem to give a shit.

“So, what, is this supposed to entice me into going to some gross party?” Mark asks.

“I mean how often do you get to meet a total lo-fier, man?” Dustin waves a hand for emphasis.

Mark blinks. “Wait. You’re serious -- this guy doesn’t have anything? Not even a bluetooth jawbone hookup?” That’s standard fare; barely requires a neural hookup. Every middle schooler in his neighborhood had one.

Dustin shakes his head. “Nothing, I swear.” He pauses. “Plus he’s totally hot.”

Chris cranes his neck up. “Okay, now you’re talking. If we’re going just to gawk at some poor kid, at least he’ll be eye candy.”

“We’re going because they have free beer, Christopher. I’m just using this as bait,” Dustin stage-whispers, and Chris sniggers.

Mark glares but he’s not quite sure why they think this is a good way to lure him out, but in the end it works. Who is he to turn down free beer?

\--

It isn’t as obvious as Dustin made it sound, not really. Plenty of kids don’t have visible implants, just subtle hints of being wired. The upper-crust students have more expensive implants, ones that are painstakingly hidden if you don’t know where to look. Mark does know, though -- phone hookups that blink the steady pattern of being bio-synched, glasses that are subtly screwed in, a stray antenna or USB port behind the ear. Plugs that don’t quite match the skintone filling those ports.

Just because things aren’t blinking like Mark’s temple doesn’t mean they’re not there. But Mark can’t even spot a single smart filling in the kid’s grin -- the closest thing he has to a socket is a matching set of pink weals behind his ears, where a jack normally goes, and it takes him some time to even see those.

He _will_ freely admit that the lo-fier is totally hot though, in an objective way. The guy is wearing a blazer and slacks tailored to his slim frame - to a fucking frat party - and he’s working it. He looks rich, but manages to not look like a total asshole. It’s an important distinction.

He’s also wearing a pair of Glasses - old tech that don’t even beam an overlay straight into the retina. Mark prefers a full screen right in his eye, and wants the direct optic implant as soon as he can get it. Some people’s Glasses have a neural hook-up too, but the guy’s seems free of any extraneous bits and bobs. Probably just hanging onto the Harvard wi-fi, or maybe tethered to an actual phone transmitter, like Chris’ rig can.

His set up makes him look like a grandfather. He might as well be using a Blackberry.

The kid notices him lurking eventually and comes over to say hi, right when Mark is standing awkwardly by himself, trying to figure out if he’s put in enough face time to leave.

"CS major?" Eduardo says lightly as they shake hands, and Mark nods. His handshake is firm and professional. Mark feels like he’s being interviewed. A handshake feels so formal -- when was the last time he touched someone else’s hands?

"Obviously. But I'm guessing you're probably not."

He smiles, too open. "You're right. I’m Eduardo." 

"I’m Mark Zuckerberg.” He switches off his usual overlay for a minute and squints. “Well, you're here at Harvard, so there can't be too much wrong with you.”

There's a pause, and then Eduardo laughs. It seems to startle both of them -- Mark isn't used to people laughing at anything he says, even when it’s actually a joke.

"I never thought so," Eduardo says, shrugging, "but apparently it's not en vogue to be without at least one interactive hole in your head.”

"You don’t have even one jack?” It’s rude, obviously, but Mark needs to know if he’s some kind of cultist or something. He doesn’t have time to befriend religious nutjobs. One jack was even part of the scholarship packages for kids with inadequate access -- a neural hookup to the Harvard research databases was a must. The only people not able to think their way through the web were the elderly and whackjobs who thought it was desanctifying the body.

“Nothing ever took.” Eduardo drinks some punch and his throat is perfectly framed by his collar. Mark stares and thinks about taking a picture, briefly, and then does, transparent screen overlay whirring back on.

Olds, cultists, and people unfortunate enough to be incompatible with tech. Mark’s never actually met someone who didn't mesh well with the neural hookups. The idea of being that cut-off, practically blind, makes him wince.

“Sorry to hear that,” Mark says. “But again, seems like you’re doing fine.”

Eduardo raises his eyebrows and keeps grinning, more sardonic this time. “You’re probably the first person I’ve seen so blinged out to take the news so lightly.”

“Why should I give a shit what you’ve got in your brain?”

“I’m just used to people being a little more...tech evangelical. Like there’s a new polymer that’ll help me control my phone with my mind if only I just had one more surgery.”

“Whatever.” Mark starts peeling the label off his bottle of beer. “If you’re not an idiot you probably know all that shit anyway.”

Eduardo laughs again and says, “So, what, are you looking to pledge?”

Mark isn’t.

\--

Chris and Dustin get him out anyway. And Mark sees Eduardo everywhere -- lunch, parties, the bar down by campus that doesn’t card or bio-scan, and trudging through the fall rain. Eduardo will wave, friendly, and Mark finds that he doesn’t really mind.

"What're you majoring in?" Mark asks him at another mixer. AEPi is easy to get into, but whatever, it made his mom happy. Dustin is shit-faced and Mark just feels warm all over, wobbly, and abandoned. Thank god for Eduardo, not making out in the corner like that deserter Chris, or in the bathroom line like Dustin. Traitors.

“Hey, nice to see you too, Mark.” He pops the cap off a bottle of beer and swigs it before he answers. "You’re asking what could possibly be worthwhile without cybernetics, aren’t you?”

"Maybe." Mark doesn't flinch. “English, probably, right?”

"Economics. And you need some water.” 

Mark isn’t sure how he produces a glass, but he takes it because Eduardo is probably not a predator and he is so goddamn thirsty. He doesn’t even try to do a bioscan once it’s in his mouth.

After a few deep gulps, he frowns and tilts his head to the side. Eduardo clicks a button on his Glasses and peers back at him. 

"Don't most people in the trading business plug in 24/7? Like, that’s some actually extra perma-neural network kinda shit.” Mark actually doesn’t have one of those -- he doesn’t want Bloomberg in his brain 24/7, thanks. 

Eduardo laughs, and Mark suddenly notices that he has a really nice mouth. His teeth are nice, too. Dustin wasn’t lying.

"Yeah. It's a pretty implant-heavy field. But that just means there are plenty of manual techniques I can pick and choose from that might be overlooked.”

"Or you could just be running an automated program for it.”

"It's just a different way to see patterns," Eduardo says, “and I’d rather understand the math then fuck it up because I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Plus, it’s not like I’m incapable of using a computer. There was an internet and STATA before cybernetics were around, and I’m not totally incompetent.”

Mark touches Eduardo’s temple without thinking about it. It’s warm, a little sweaty, and he doesn’t jump as an afterthought, just stares at him.

“Can I touch?” he asks as an afterthought, rubbing along the socket behind his own ear with his free hand.

“Hum,” Eduardo says, his first verbal bobble of the night, but he turns his head so Mark can see it, a keloid scar in a field of tan skin and dark hair. It feels smooth, dead where Eduardo’s face felt alive. 

“Huh,” Mark says.

Eduardo smiles and pushes his hand away. “I’ve gotta run,” he says gently, “but I’ll see you around, okay?”

\--

Mark keeps running into Eduardo, as he works his way through the first months of sophomore year. Eduardo is a stats TA for Dustin’s intro class and Dustin is weirdly adamant about getting him and Chris to hangout.

“I can’t drink with my students,” Eduardo says, “and especially not in their dorm.”

“That’s lame,” Dustin says. “Can you hang out if I say it’s a _sober_ movie night?”

He makes a good faith effort to stay “sober” in his email but it’s an obvious lost cause. Eduardo shows up with a six-pack in-hand anyway.

“I don’t want to be the lame TA. Plus, I’ve already graded your last quiz so I think I’m fine.”

“How’d I do?” Dustin asks, grinning through a fully engaged optic array.

Eduardo laughs and takes a colder beer from their fridge. “You’ll find out Monday.”

Dustin pouts, but only for a second before smiling again. “You’ve met my roommate, Chris, right?”

“Yeah, AEPi, right?” Eduardo asks, and holds out his hand.

Mark isn’t sure how he feels about watching Chris and Eduardo chat in the kitchen. The movie is playing on their old television but also streaming directly into his interface through the broadcaster, so Mark can stare at them without missing anything. He’s got it on overlay, so his field of vision isn’t totally hijacked by his hardware.

“Eduardo likes reading,” Dustin IMs him. 

“So?”

“Chris is an English major. Look at how cute they are.”

“Just because you can’t get laid doesn’t mean you have to play matchmaker.”

“Rude.” A paper ball hits the side of his face. Mark looks over and Dustin is, in fact, cuddling with a girl from the floor above them.

“I bet he’s not even gay,” Mark sends back, and then he opens up his homework. 

\--

A week or so later, Eduardo knocks politely at the door. All he really has is Dustin’s drunken “stop by anytime,” but he’s started friendships with less. And he feels like he’s crawling out of his skin, only seeing people for half hour meetings and then sitting in the library for hours. 

"Oh hey, it’s our anachronistic friend!” Chris says when he opens it. Mario Kart’s paused on the TV -- Dustin collects the classics and has vintage consoles as well as an Oculus Rift. He thinks it’s important to have a sense of history, and it works out nicely with the fact that television screen works way better than a non-neutral optical rig for playing games.

"I brought pizza? I can't be in the library anymore, the lights there give me a headache,” Eduardo says, stepping inside. He feels vaguely unsure; Dustin or Chris could just grab the pizza and hustle him back out.

Dustin pops up from his slouch on the couch. "Pizza!"

"We're not really studying," Chris says apologetically, grabbing the two boxes from Eduardo and shutting the door, "but you could probably study in Mark's room." 

Chris moves his own handheld controller from the coffee table and heads to the kitchen for paper towels and beer.

"He's so wired in you could probably shave his head before he'd notice you." Dustin pauses. “But we’re waiting to do that after he really pisses us off. Don’t steal the opportunity from us.”

Eduardo grins, feeling relief. “Remind me to stay on your good side.”

“Bringing food is a good first step,” Chris says, handing Eduardo a beer on his way back to the couch. Eduardo pulls up a chair.

“Yeah. Plus I think you’re helping us with Project: Socialize Mark. Although now he’s just gonna learn that bribery is the way to get friends.”

“Well, I don’t have much else to offer in terms of utility but bribes,” Eduardo says after a bite. “He seems pretty house-trained, and I run into him quite a bit at parties.”

“Yeah, well, you don’t live with him,” Chris says. “No manners.”

“I thought I was going to be the slob,” says Dustin, sighing. “I’m not even close. This kid doesn’t even shower.”

“Hey!” Mark yells from his room, and he stumbles out, blinking at them. “I smell food.”

“I brought food?” Eduardo says, and Mark just nods at him, moving toward pizza on slightly unsteady feet.

“How long have you been plugged in?” Eduardo asks, and Chris rolls his eyes.

“It’s been eons.”

“Marks is gonna start growing stalactites soon,” says Dustin, grabbing a slice out from under Mark’s fingers.

“I take regular stretch breaks,” Mark says, offended.

“Is that true?” Eduardo asks, and Mark grins.

“Obviously not. I’m just planning to replace my body with a mechanical one as soon as I’m a millionaire.”

“The dream!” chimes in Dustin.

“The eccentric billionaire route, then,” Eduardo says, and Mark snorts.

“The smart kind,” Mark says, “the kind that will live forever.” He pauses, chewing. “No offense, I mean.”

“Because I’ll have to die in this fleshy prison?” Eduardo’s grin is wry.

“Exactly, Wardo,” Mark says, mouth half full of pizza.

“Is that a nickname I hear?” Dustin says, and Eduardo shakes his head. 

“Mark hasn’t even given us nicknames,” says Chris. “I think you’ve imprinted on him.”

“It’s Edu, if you want to shorten it,” Eduardo says, shaking his head. “But no one ever calls me that.”

“It’s fine, because we’re christening you Wardo and claiming you from Brazil for the Kirkland dorms.”

“Cheers.” Chris raises his pizza in a toast.

“Saúde,” Eduardo says, returning the gesture. 

“Tchim-tchim,” says Mark, and Eduardo slides him a side-eyed glance. Mark winks, and taps the side of his visor.

It’s pretty dorky, but he appreciates the gesture.

\--

Eduardo is always up to meet new friends, and the guys in Kirkland seem like good additions to his growing collection of contacts. They’re smart, rigged, and one’s already caused quite a stir by turning down a Microsoft gig (he may not have a rig, but he reads the tech mags anyway). It’s the kind of networking he’s always supposed to be doing when he inevitably ends up in another study group with other ladderclimbers.

He’s surprised by how much he _likes_ them, though. 

Their dorm is a jumble of beer cans, USB cords, a couch and a couple ratty chairs, and they have yet to eschew a real TV in favor of direct-rig screening, so it’s homey. Star Wars posters are tacked to the wall. It makes Eduardo’s single seem a little barren, but he likes to be portable. 

Eduardo doesn’t spend a lot of time in his dorm anyway -- that’s wasteful, when he could be networking. Study groups, clubs, even parties; all opportunities to meet more and do more.

But Dustin keeps inviting him over. So he goes, even if he doesn’t think that Dustin’s mission to hook him up with Chris is going to succeed. He’s open to it, sure, but Chris is nice and he’s not good with ‘nice.’ Too needy, too selfish, and too pitiable.

Plus, they’d already tried it last year.

Mark’s roommate has a girlfriend with a single who he’s all but moved in with. Mark has shoved the beds together, which almost makes it big enough for them to share. 

It doesn’t happen often. They both sleep at weird hours, Mark waking up right when Eduardo comes to their room to study, Eduardo passing out at 3 am with a highlighter in his hand. But it is kind of nice, in a middle-school-best-friends kind of way that Eduardo can appreciate in the academic sense.

\--

Dustin succeeds at both making movie nights A Thing and getting laid, but Operation: I Know Two Gay Guys seems to be hitting a wall.

“You could start going to Allied in Pride meetings to find more dudes for Chris,” Mark IMs as Dustin frowns and stares at Eduardo and Chris sitting around, studying in a comfortable silence.

“Chris already goes,” Dustin sends back, mental typing slower than Mark. Mark can’t code that way for shit, but it’s fine for chatting or the occasional notes.

Eduardo stays over sometimes, and Mark keeps coming up out of a coding haze to find him passed out in his bed at weird hours in the morning, suit folded up and clad in undershirt and boxers. His limbs are long and tan. He doesn’t snore. Mark figures he ends up there because Mark hardly uses it.

Dustin doesn’t understand why Eduardo never follows Chris back into his room.

Mark doesn’t really care -- he just shoves Eduardo over and sleeps next to him when he needs to. 

Eduardo always looks bashful and sleepy-eyed in the morning, sometimes disoriented.  
“Ahn...ou seja…” he’ll start, and honestly the filler words make Mark a little inspired to learn Portuguese.

Most of the time he’ll get Mark breakfast. It seems like an acceptable trade off for use of his bed. He’s not sure why Chris laughs at him about it.

\--

"Dustin and I are going shopping tomorrow,” Eduardo says.

"Since when are you and Dustin even friends?" Mark asks, “I thought he was like, your student and you couldn’t fraternize.” Eduardo likes talking on the phone, because he can't just send texts with a brain-controlled keyboard. The only other person Mark knows who uses a phone as a phone is his mother, and he reminds Eduardo of this about every third call. They text sometimes too, but it's easier to talk out loud as he stalks across a windy campus.

“I think I’ve already violated that rule. And he wants a 'date outfit.'"

“I hate that I can hear you make air-quotes. Who even makes air-quotes anymore.”

“Well if you want to take him shopping, then you are more than welcome to it.”

Mark snorts. “No, I’m busy.”

“Homework?”

“Obviously not. I’ve been working on something -- course selection is a bitch and I’ve figured out how to fix it.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Mark doesn’t need to explain what he’s doing -- he’ll show it to Eduardo instead.

“Are you going to be impossible to have a civil conversation with soon?”

“I’m always civil.”

“I forget myself sometimes,” Eduardo says. Mark can hear his grin. 

\--

Mark sleeps less when he’s working, especially on something he thinks people will actually like. Stuff like Synapse, not like his own custom blog layouts or whatever. It’s not that he wants to be popular at Harvard, really, but he certainly wants to be noticed. A finals club would be cool; he’s always wanted to be a member of an illicit secret society.

Right now he’s mostly noticed by Eduardo, who stops by every few days and always ends up hustling Mark into the shower or to the cafeteria. He skips a few days because of midterms, but Mark’s pretty sure he’ll be back at the least convenient time. 

He’s right.

“Eduardo’s sleeping,” Dustin stage whispers when Mark comes in after a comp sci class, and he scowls. He planned on sleeping, grabbing six blissful hours before another all-nighter.

“Doesn’t he have his own place?”

“Yeah, but if he sleeps there he’ll stop bringing us food,” Chris says. Always pragmatic.

“There’s a sandwich waiting for you at your desk,” says Dustin. “I had to remove it from my sight or I was going to eat it.”

“What, didn’t you get one?”

“I could eat a hundred sandwiches right now, Zuckerberg -- I haven’t slept in two days because I’m grinding out this midterm, and Wardo won’t do it for me.”

“I highly recommend you get started on your take-home exams, too,” adds Chris.

Mark shuffles into his bedroom and shuts the door. Eduardo is sleeping, curled on his side with his head awkwardly cradled in an econ book. He’s still in his clothes, which Mark knows he hates, but he doesn’t have any more classes for the day so Mark thinks he’ll let him rest.

It takes him a minute to realize he knows Eduardo’s class schedule when he doesn’t even know Chris’. He unwraps the sandwich and wonders if making an extra friend is a glitch or a feature in his plans for Harvard.

Eduardo murmurs softly in his sleep, restless, and Mark opens up his code. Course Match is going to be a hit. He’ll get everyone else’s attention, too.

\--

“So they’re fucking, right?” 

The suite’s living room has been cloaked in silence for about an hour, and Dustin startles when Chris breaks it.

“Huh what?” Dustin is sprawled out on the dorm-issued couch, and Chris is sitting upside down on a chair they dragged in from the side of the road, legs up against the back and head dangling toward the ground.

“Mark. Eduardo. Fucking.” Chris rests his tablet on his stomach and pokes his two index fingers together. What Dustin likes best about Chris is that he’s actually a rude motherfucker who pretends to be classy and erudite.

“Oh. I mean, yeah, why else would anyone put up with Mark?”

Chris huffs a laugh. “That’s mean. Aren’t you guys besties?”

“Yeah. We’re in a lot of classes together, and he’s not a dumbass, so it was kind of inevitable. I mean, you’ve met some of the CS majors, right?”

“Ha, unfortunately yes, I’ve had some experience with them.”

“Cute, Hughes. But you know what I mean. It’s dire.”

“I’m sure.” He picks his tablet back up. “We’ve got a wider scope of people out in the liberal arts, you know.”

“I was hoping you and Wardo were going to --” Dustin pokes his two index fingers together and waggles his eyebrows for good measure.

“Nah.”

“Why not?”

Chris shrugs, which is weird upside-down. “Mark kept staring at us. I figured he’d already staked a claim -- bro code, dude.”

“You’re a good friend,” Dustin says, seriously. He means it, too.

“Not _that_ good a friend,” Chris says. “I’ve already actually hit that.”

“What?” Dustin manages not to crack his voice, but it’s a near miss.

“Like you weren’t drunk all of freshman year too, dude. It happens.” Chris pauses. “It...well I guess it happened a couple times. But he’s a busy guy.”

“And you’re an ungrateful jerk who gave that up?” Dustin might not date boys but he knows a catch when he sees one carrying pizza into his dorm.

“Shut up.” Chris is grinning, though. “He only bought me dinner a couple times.”

“That’s more than you’ve ever done for me, Christopher. I bet it was love.”

“It was booze,” Chris says, “and that hair. But mostly just a fling.”

“I guess.” Dustin is bad at flings, more of a serial monogamist than anything.

“He’s also pretty neurotic. Sweet, but kind of weirdo.”

“But he’s so hot,” Dustin says emphatically.

“Dude, he likes _Mark_. I’ll never measure up.”

“It’s true that you bathe on the regular and have many upstanding qualities.”

“Exactly.”

Dustin squints at Chris and wonders how all his blood isn’t rushing to his head. 

“You should find us a boyfriend that brings us dessert.”

Chris laughs at that, loud. “Is Wardo our collective boyfriend?”

“Uh, yeah, definitely,” Dustin says, “it’s not like Mark is gonna keep him satisfied.”

“This might be true.” Chris picks his tablet back up. “But it’ll take Wardo a while to notice.”

\--

For someone who hates parties, Mark keeps meeting significant people at them. At this point in the year, he protests mostly out of habit and the slight satisfaction that comes from frustrating the hell out of his roommates. This particular night, Eduardo joined in the cajoling, shoving him into the bathroom and blocking the door until Mark agreed to shower.

At the moment, though, Eduardo’s abandoned him, talking to a lacrosse player with broad shoulders. Chris and Dustin are playing flip cup, and he’s left at the keg alone.

This is where he meets Erica.

She's not a tech major but she's pretty wired, Feed plug and full ocular array, although hers is styled like a pair of fashionable glasses instead of scuba goggles. They probably don’t beam straight into her eyes. She smiles and he tries to shake her hand when he introduces himself.

When he asks her why she’s gargoyled up, she rolls her eyes at him. “Why wouldn’t I be rigged? It’s not like you have to be a computer genius for it.”

He doesn’t have a good answer for that. Erica yanks him out onto the dance floor and makes him shuffle around. She touches his Glass apparatus, and the light at his temple, when they dance. 

He’s into it, and he touches her bare shoulder. Three beers later he tries kissing her, and leaves the night with a hickey and her phone number. It seems pretty promising, even if he is pretty busy coding stuff. A girlfriend seems like one of those things that he’d like to have, even if he never put much effort into it.

\--

Eduardo is tired a lot. He’s got a lot of obligations these days, and he’s trying really hard to get noticed by someone in a finals club. Quite a few of the guys in his business club are in them, and they seem impressed by his extracurriculars at least.

It’s okay, though. His friendships for the year seem pretty solidified, even if he has to pay the rent of meals that involve at least one vegetable and the occasional pizzas. He has the cash to keep them from getting scurvy. 

Mark, especially, is bad at taking care of himself, which gives Eduardo a convenient study room, but is less useful when it comes to getting to know him.

He plays games with Dustin on his aged Nintendo system, and talks about books with Chris, but Mark and he mostly sit in companionable silence. Sometimes Mark will talk at him about code structure, but Eduardo hasn’t taken enough advance systems or logic or anything, really, to be more than a sounding board.

When he isn’t in the suite, that’s when Mark talks. He’ll send IMs, or call him on his way between classes, and Eduardo isn’t sure what to do with that. Mark seems too focused and destined for things to be that intimate.

It’s not the worst friendship he’s made. He’s happy Chris doesn’t mind that he’s hanging around after the previous year’s slow fade out, but he hasn’t brought it up and his roommates don’t seem to know. Eduardo would apologize if he felt bad about it, but he doesn’t, really. He’s busy and it wasn’t emotional, not really.

Honestly, he’s not big on emotional intimacy these days anyway. He doesn’t have the time.

\--

Dustin is the one that notices the scars on Eduardo's fingers, but he's not tactless enough to ask about them outright. 

He asks Mark instead.

"What scars? What are you talking about?" Mark says. His own are pretty much gone -- the pick up just never worked, and inert metal was stuck in his fingertips for a couple days until he got them cut right out again.

"God, why do you even have eyes!" Dustin says, exasperated. 

"If you're not using them to stare at Eduardo, you really are a waste of bio-matter," adds Chris, who doesn't even have any kind of optical jack and relies on tablets and Glasses to see anything important. He’s the whole the reason why they have to have a television in the dorm room in the first place - convenient for hosting Eduardo but not much else.

Anyway, it's not fair -- he notices plenty of things about Eduardo, including his hands. He has elegant fingers and they have weird calluses, presumably from holding things like a tablet stylus or a pencil. Mark’s nails are bitten down but Eduardo’s look like he gets a manicure or something regularly.

"He's coming over tomorrow. I can make him sit in the common room if you want to look at him all evening." Mark blinks and his calendar is up in his optical display to make sure that’s the case.

Chris snorts. “Yeah right. You want the Brazilian all to yourself.”

“I think you’re projecting,” Mark says flatly.

There’s a pause. “Wait, are you serious? We pretty much assumed you were on your way to tapping that, if not already tapping that,” says Chris, looking up from whatever game he was playing on his tablet.

“If you two are not making kissy faces then why is he in your room all the time?” Dustin asks, clicking off his visual overlay to give Mark the full force of his stare.

“I’ve been seeing this girl from BU,” Mark says. “Eduardo normally studies and lets me talk code structure to him. He’s not bad at the logic.”

Chris looks horrified. “Are you fucking with us?”

“Sometimes he takes a nap? His dorm is really noisy.”

“Yeah, and he definitely can’t afford any noise cancellers. Or even his own off-campus apartment.” Dustin’s eyes are narrowing. “He’s seriously just sleeping there?”

“Does _he_ know you’re seeing a girl from BU?” Chris asks slowly.

“Yeah?” Mark says. He thinks so, anyway -- they had dinner the other week. “I mean, he was over the other night and we talked about it.” 

Eduardo smiled sweetly at him when Mark came home from his date and he was pretty sure he’d mentioned it before passing out next to him.

Dustin wolf-whistles and Mark flips him off, saying, “And it was a pretty straight night all around.”

“No way either of you are,” says Dustin, too quick.

“Says who?” Mark doesn’t know why he’s even entertaining this argument.

“Says Kinsey, motherfucker. He brings you food and makes you go to bed and listens to you talk about your website shit. That’s girlfriend material, dude.”

“Also, Dustin’s heteronormative ideas of relationships aside, Eduardo is definitely not straight,” says Chris, waving his hand in the air.

“Whatever.” 

“I think you’re being closed-minded here, Zuck,” Chris says, smirking.

“If I liked dick wouldn’t I’ve figured it out by now?” Mark doesn’t get why it has to be a _romantic_ codependent relationship. “I mean, I’d like to think I’m pretty intimately familiar with my own and the things it likes.”

“Maybe you’re a late bloomer,” offers Chris.

“Also, don’t you think you’re pushing your luck? There’s no way two different people on this planet can put up with you at once,” Dustin says. He’s not even trying to be nice.

“They should consider themselves lucky that they can bask in my genius.” Mark crosses his arms over his chest and hopes he’s regaining the upperhand in this mortifying discussion. 

Chris groans. “Yeah okay.”

“I mean, you two aren’t fucking.”

“That’s because we’re just friends,” Chris says.

“I mean, if we were both drunk enough…” Dustin says, and he winks behind his optic array. 

“No, Dustin,” Chris says and Dustin pouts.

“Can’t I be ‘just friends’ with Wardo?” He manages to hold off on the airquotes.

“Maybe,” says Chris, “but like, why?”

“I need a beer for this big gay intervention,” Mark says and he gets himself one, and doesn’t get any for his roommates.

“Rude,” Dustin says from the couch. “Why Eduardo even likes you, I’ll never know.”

“Is this what you two gossip about on your shopping dates?”

Mark suddenly has a horrifying thought.

“Wait...Wardo doesn’t think we’re dating, does he?”

There’s a long stretched out moment of silence that’s broken by the sound of Chris’ hysterical laughter.

“You’re positive you’re not actually hooking up?” he says in between gasps.

Mark shakes his head. “Yeah, pretty sure it I’d’ve noticed.”

“Then rest assured, he does not think you’re in an incidental romantic relationship,” says Chris. He wipes at his eyes and Mark remembers why he so often eschews all overtures of friendship.

“Anyway, we never gossip about you. I’m actually just really bad at dressing myself,” Dustin says, frowning at his own t-shirt. “Chris always looks so put together and it’s intimidating.”

Chris smirks, preening a little.

“Eduardo has good taste, though. Plus I got a date with the girl on the top floor in part because she liked my shirt.”

Chris holds up his hand and receives a high five from Dustin silently.

“Whatever,” Mark says. He has code to write.

\--

Eduardo is pretty sure he’s starting to sink more time into hanging out with three guys in Kirkland than he was ever planning on.

It’s not a bad thing, not really, but he needs to get the attention of some finals club and he isn’t sure hanging with a bunch of sophomore cyborgs is really the best way to do it. The Investment Club is going fine, though, and his portfolio there is starting to gain some attention. He’s pretty sure he’ll win a seat on the board for next year.

He’s out in the city on a Sunday because he’s managed to finally catch up with his own studying schedule when he sees Mark, and then Erica, sitting in a window of a restaurant he recommended.

They’re cute, he thinks, and she’s sharp. He’s only met her once or twice but she’s made him laugh both times, and he thinks Marks probably needs that. She seems self-sufficient, which is also good, because Eduardo knows he isn’t and that’s why he’s holding back. He wants, but he knows better now.

Mark is tapping his rig and Erica is nodding, smiling, and they’re probably sending each other funny videos or something. Eduardo makes himself smile; he wants Mark to be happy and it seems like he is.

\--

“I got weed,” Chris says after slamming the dorm’s room behind him.

“I’m busy,” grumbles Mark. CourseMatch is so close, he can feel it, but he also has to do other stuff like go to the bare minimum of classes required to pass, and hang out with his girlfriend who is very enthusiastic about make outs and what follows make outs.

It’s been a taxing week, basically. 

“Yeah, whatever Mark. It’s not like you’re doing work for class.”

“Mark,” Dustin says solemnly, “you smoke up with us and I promise to do up to 3 hours of debugging and front-end tweaks to that thing you’ve been working on.”

Mark squints at him, shifting his Glass to transparent view. “5 hours. I need someone to QC this.”

“You’re getting really fucking baked then,” Dustin says and Mark nods. 

“You ever done this?” Chris asks as he packs a vape on the coffee table. 

Mark thinks about lying but doesn’t. “Like, twice, maybe. I didn’t really feel much.”

“Don’t worry, we’ll get you fucked up. I have so many great visualization screens for you to look at, dude.” Dustin’s already messing with his Glasses setting.

“So how are you and Erica doing?”

“We’re okay.” Mark is more excited about coding than seeing her, lately, but he’s always really liked coding.

Chris picks up the vape, which is a small and silver box, and says “The trick to this one is to inhale slowly.”

Mark coughs at his turn but manages to inhale something, and he passes it to Dustin. 

They pass it around about four times before Mark says, “Wait. I think...I think I feel it?”

“A couple more hits and I’m gonna send you this ridiculous 3D imaging thing,” Dustin says, wiggling his fingers in the air to type something.

“Rude to talk about something you’re not going to share with the class,” says Chris, but it sounds drawn out and lazy.

Mark doesn’t say anything and things about how deep his lungs are when he inhales.

“Okay yeah,” Dustin says, giggling, “I’m fucked up.”

Mark gets a message on his screen and opens the file, and it is so much to look at at once

-

“I’m really hungry,” Chris says but he doesn’t move to grab his tablet or anything. He’s packed the vape for a second round but hasn’t touched it either.

“Eduardo’s on his way, dude.”

“You can’t keep treating him like your personal delivery service,” Mark says, and there’s a knock.

“I brought pizza and some Doritos,” Eduardo says at the door, and Chris stumbles over to it. He’s got his Glasses on and is watching some subpar version of the full neural vid Dustin sent.

“Heeey,” says Dustin as he pushes himself up from the couch

“Vape’s on the table if you want to hit it -- you’re the guest.”

Eduardo’s passing out paper plates and Mark doesn’t even know where they came from.

“C’mon, you’re not allowed to be our judgy sober friend,” Dustin says, poking Eduardo as he sits down next to Mark on the couch.

Chris coughs hard after he takes a hit and passes it over to Eduardo.

“I’ve never used a vape,” he says, the box small in his long fingers. 

“Chris sucks,” Mark says, putting his hand over one of Eduardo’s. “Just go slow.”

Eduardo smiles indulgently at him, which sort of pisses him off because he’s not cute when he’s drunk and he’s not amusing like this, but Eduardo takes a hit and Mark’s distracted by the way smoke curls out of his pink mouth on the exhale.

-

Dustin is fighting Eduardo to the death. Mark is laying on the carpeted floor, staring at them backlit by Mario Kart.

“You guys are boring,” he says, but it takes the words a long time to travel out of his mouth. 

“No, dude, this is kinda hot,” Chris says, and Mark turns his head too fast to stare at him incredulously.

“What.”

“Whatever, straight boy.”

Eduardo wins and does some kind of uncoordinated flailing dance, laughing. His eyes are even more crinkled up than usual.

“Fuck you man,” Dustin says, savagely opening a bag of Doritos.

Eduardo’s face falls immediately. “Oh, Dustin, shit. I’m sorry.”

Dustin glares, mouth full. “Wait, really?”

“No. I’m the Mario Kart master and that’s all there is to it.” He grins.

“It’s true, Dustin,” Mark says, and Dustin blinks.

“Dude you haven’t said anything for like an hour.”

“Not true,” Mark says, getting up slowly. Eduardo catches him under the arm and just says, “Bed?”

Mark nods.

He barely manages to pull off his pants and falls onto the mattress with a thunk, and Eduardo slides in beside him, eyelids drooping. They both sort of shift around until Mark just grabs him, presses up against Eduardo’s back.

“Stop moving,” he says to the back of Eduardo’s ear and Eduardo _shivers_ against him.

Eduardo is so warm, Mark thinks as he digs his chin into his shoulder.

\--

Mark cancels his date, and thinks maybe his roommates are right. Erica isn’t nearly as tolerant as Eduardo is of his coding binges, weird sleep habits, and inability to communicate in a timely manner. Those aren’t really reasonable things to expect her to like, but the point remains.

The sex, however, is fucking great, and that’s really the advantage.

“You have to stop sleeping here all the time,” he says to Eduardo around 3 am. Mark’s drinking a Redbull and slamming it on the desk woke him up.

“Como? Like, right now?” Eduardo tends to burrow into the covers before Mark goes to bed, and he’s peering out of a cocoon of them, confused and sleep mussed.

“No, but like, in general,” Mark says, minimizing his SublimeText window so he can look at Eduardo’s face in the dim light of his desk lamp.

“Oh. Uh, okay.”

Mark feels a little unfair -- Eduardo isn’t actually over that much. He stops by two or three times a week, crashes there once a week, mostly. He has other shit to do, like Mark does. But Mark doesn’t want to bring home Erica and have a dude in his bed; it seems like it’d be hard to explain.

\--

Mark comes home from class and finds Eduardo wearing Chris’ Glasses. Chris doesn’t have a direct ocular array, so his Glasses work as dumb tech, too. They don’t require the neural network to get on-line. Eduardo has his own pair, but they might as well be a monitor -- he can’t manipulate anything without hardware. Even Chris’ weak neural network lets him type without a keyboard -- it’s slower than an implanted one for most people, but surfing the web by thinking is pretty convenient. Chris’ Glasses would be slower than usual, not connected directly to his neural network, but it would still be way better than how Eduardo interfaced.

Chris is making an exaggerated face of concentration and Eduardo laughs at something. Mark goes to the kitchen to get a soda. He didn’t realize that Eduardo would still be around this much after he stopped taking inadvertent naps in Mark’s bed.

Eduardo sighs a little wistfully when he hands Chris back his display.

“Those things are barely better than an HD monitor,” Mark says, settling on the couch. “You might as well just hook your phone to the TV.”

“At least I can do that here. The TV in my dorm’s common room has been replaced by just a broadcaster, so I’m SOL for having movie nights.”

“No wonder you keep coming to Dustin’s,” Chris says, and Eduardo laughs.

“Yeah, well. It’s a normal college thing, right? Movie nights.”

“You make it sound like you don’t normally indulge in ‘normal college things.’”

“I like to keep busy,” Eduardo says, “and sometimes that doesn’t leave a lot of time for getting wasted.”

Mark snorts. “That’s the sacrifice you make for padding your resume. I mean, if I was in your shoes, I would too. Your dad can only get you so far, if you’re not compatible with anyone’s software…” Mark trails off because Chris has kicked him in the shin, hard. He’s not dumb enough to miss the implication, but Eduardo doesn’t look angry.

“You know I’m right.”

Eduardo rolls his eyes and leans back into the couch. “Sure. But you’re also a dick.”

“It’s the price I pay for being right all the time.” Mark shrugs.

\--

“I think I’m finally done,” Mark says into the air at 2 am. He adds a fist pump.

Eduardo stirs -- he’s fallen asleep with flashcards spilling over his chest. _Flashcards_. “Hum?”

“The project I’ve been working on. See, course selection is a shitshow. I’m never in the same labs as Dustin, even when we try to sync up. This’ll let you see your friends’ schedules, and it’ll predict the most desirable schedule for you, too, when you input stuff.”

Eduardo rubs his eyes and Mark thinks for a second, he’s lucky he’s adorable. He then curses Chris and Dustin for making him think that.

“Yeah?”

“You put in your major and what requirements you’ve already got, and you can input your biometrics too, and it’ll come up with the ideally timed schedule for you. It’ll track your average daily steps and come up with a location-based schedule if you need that, too.”

“Wow.” Eduardo blinks. “Wait, is this why we’ve spent the past two weeks talking about predictive modeling?”

Mark nods, and moving his head around makes him a little dizzy. He hasn’t slept in a while, and there’s hardly any light in the room. His eyes feel gummy

“Yeah. That stuff you wrote out for me was actually pretty useful.”

“Did you just take my algorithm?”

“Only for one of the searches -- everything else is in neural web so I had to figure out a bunch of stuff.” Mark yawns. “You’ll thank me when it’s time to register again.”

“I have my four year plan already mapped out, but thanks.” Eduardo smiles and it looks forced.

“C’mon. You could easily get an odometer or whatever, and input that stuff. I mean it’s cheap dumb tech, right?”

Eduardo is stretching his neck, making it look even longer than usual. The skin is inviting, and Dustin is a dead man. 

“I’ll pass, but I’m sure it’ll be popular. I can send it out on some of my clubs’ listservs, if you want.”

Mark flops onto the bed, only bothering to take off his shirt. “That’d be great.” He hadn’t put too much thought into how to promote it; if it’s good then people will use it, he figures. But inviting people would be even better.

He waits a few beats. “So...when _are_ you doing that, again?”

Eduardo is face-first in one of Mark’s pillows. He sleeps in the least comfortable looking positions possible.

“Can’t that wait until normal people are awake?”

“Dustin’s awake.”

“Ah yeah, what a good example of normality.” Eduardo turns his head for Mark can see half his face. “Your genius can wait six hours, Zuckerberg.”

“My genius just wants to be recognized.”

“Believe me,” Eduardo mumbles, “It’s hard to miss.”

\--

CourseMatch is, in fact, a hit. Mark knew it would be, but he’s surprised by how fast it spreads around campus after only sending out about ten emails. Eduardo appears to have a lot of friends.

He spends a couple days watching his analytics in the corner of his screen and spends all of dinner at a place near BU talking to Erica about how they keep getting better -- his unique users numbers are at least a third of campus by now.

“That’s great, Mark!” she says but he can tell the enthusiasm is diminishing as the evening goes by.

“How’re your classes going?” he asks as their entrees arrive, and she lights up. They’re both taking art history, so that kills a good half hour.

He pulls up SublimeText and fiddles with something when she goes to the bathroom. He doesn’t close it when she comes back.

\--

“What’s a good idea for a date?”

Mark is standing outside in the snow watching Eduardo smoke a cigarette. He rolls his own, a bad habit made even more inconvenient, but his hands are deft with it and he never spills tobacco.

Eduardo looks at him, amused. His hair is tousled artfully and Mark hates that smoking makes him look even cooler.

“Erica’s pissed at me because I can’t stop talking about CourseMatch.”

“You’re too self-aware,” Eduardo says after an inhale, smoke curling out of his mouth. “It’s like you’re working really hard to be an asshole instead of just checking yourself when it happens.”

Mark crosses his arms and frowns. “I like talking about it.”

“I know you do. Here’s a date idea though: try listening more than you talk.”

“That’s not what I meant.”

Eduardo smiles. “Well I don’t see you dressing up for a nice restaurant if these are the shoes you insist on wearing outside. Try something fun; ice skating?”

Mark takes a second to consider that but his vitals alarm pings him, informing him that he should head inside. 

“Hmm?”

“My biometric program is letting me know I’m cold.”

Eduardo actually laughs at that, looking delighted. “Is that what all that hardware is for? To let you know you should be wearing a jacket?”

“No, that’s just a bonus feature.” Mark rubs his hands together.

“Let me take you shopping for a decent coat.”

“Your gloves don’t even have fingers on them so I don’t think you can harass me about practical winter wear.”

Eduardo wiggles the fingers on his free hand. “To be fair, my fingers don’t feel too much of anything these days.”

“Yeah?”

He lets smoke out of his mouth slowly -- Mark knows he doesn’t smoke much, and seems to savor it. He likes watching; Eduardo asleep is unguarded but here he’s relaxed, eyes fluttering closed. Mark doesn’t think about breathing very often but he watches as Eduardo makes sure smoke curls into the bottom of his lungs.

“Yeah. Not since the keyboard implants didn’t take.” 

Mark feels the impulse and follows it, grabbing Eduardo’s free hand and flipping it. He tugs off the glove and Eduardo looks bemused, mouth a dubious line.

The scars are pretty noticeable from this close, Mark thinks, ugly lines bisecting each of Eduardo's fingerprints. There's a bigger scar that cuts through his lifeline, and that one is still a little pink, like the scars behind his ears.

Eduardo curls his fingers into a fist and frowns at Mark.

"Dustin had mentioned that you had scars on your hands...I was curious."

"Just a reminder of another thing I failed to do properly."

"What?"

"The keyboard implant? My father thought it would be at least a step up from relying on extra hardware, but instead I ended up with a blood infection." 

Mark grimaces. “Mine just didn’t take. The implants were fine, but my neural net never meshed. All I had was some bruising after they got taken out, though.”

"Well, I'm just lucky I was a track runner in high school. Don't need your fingers for that."

Eduardo keeps the cigarette in his lips and frees his hand, pulling his glove back on.

Mark balls his hands into fists and shoves them in his pockets.

“Take her ice skating,” Eduardo says.

\--

“You want to plug in?” Erica doesn’t sound grossed out, which is a bonus.

“I mean, I think we’re .” Mark took her ice skating, where she giggled and smiled and generally had a good time. He mostly skated in circles with her, debugging some stuff from CourseMatch, answering emails. He tried skating backward to see if he could (he could). It was fun. Now they’re back in her room, her roommates at a party, and he couldn’t keep from asking while they were making out.

“It’s a big commitment,” she says. “I’ve honestly never done it with anyone, like, seriously.”

Mark has, with his friends from high school, with a girl during a Senior Week trip out to the Cape, and once with a guy at a frat party his freshman year. 

“Oh,” Mark says. He’s thumbing at the cord in his pocket. “I mean, we don’t have to?”

“I mean...it could be fun.” She bats her eyelashes at him, which is weird. She’s not very coquettish, a word Chris used two weeks ago.

“We don’t have to do a deep dive or anything.”

“Top level only?” 

He smiles at her -- she gets this stuff, implicitly, wired since middle school. She smiles back and he kisses the corner of it, and then they’re making out again. She’s a good kisser, not sloppy, and she scrapes her nails through his hair.

“Yeah. It doesn’t have to be risky or anything.”

“Okay.” She says it in one big exhale. “But. I’m not sleeping you when we’re plugged in.”

He tries not to scowl. “Uh. Kissing, though?”

She nods. “It’s just. That’s really intimate, you know?” which, no, he doesn’t. They’ve already fucked.

It’s nice, though, brushing her hair back and sliding the cable behind her ear; that’s intimate but intensely erotic, and Mark feels his dick stirring.

“Now me,” he says, and she does, hands smaller and gentler than what he’s used to.

It takes them a second to sync up; he has to pull down a bunch of preliminary firewalls, and assumes she’s doing the same thing

“Whoa,” he hears her gasp, and he flips out of opaque to overlay mode, looking at her. Her eyes are wide and he’s moves to kiss her, but she pushes his shoulder.

“Jesus, Mark, what is all this?” She’s tracking something he can’t see.

Being plugged in feels warm, like the heat of overexerting yourself, but with the chill of winter against his face. She likes skiing and he’s looking at a bunch of mountain trails on top of one another. It’s friendly, too; she has a bunch of unlocked photos and videos and shit and those are buzzing past his visual cortex.

“I don’t’ know where you are,” he says, because he can barely tell she’s moving in him. He closes his eyes and thinks, hard, finds her in a discard pile she shouldn’t even see -- lists of friends and frats and dorms and colleges and programs.

“This stuff is trash,” he says but stuff is rustling in his ears anyway. He grabs her hand and she squeezes.

“Girlfriend Plan?”

“Jeez, get out of there,” he says, and pushes her to music he’s been listening to, which causes this weird sound overlay to start up when they both start thinking of different songs

“Kiss me,” she says, and so he does, lights pinging over his screen and chimes in his ears. She’s into pop and he’s into EDM, dumb shit, and the beats pulses through the cable between them.

She’s really into politics, he can tell, there’s a weird bundle of mixed signals about this happening, and it makes Mark feel prickly. 

“You’re so,” she says, and laughs. It’s like they’re high, kind of.

Mark wonders what this would be like high and she starts laughing again.

“What is this visual overlay even?”

He almost says ‘It’s Dustin,’ but Mark isn’t thinking about Dustin when he has a hard on.

“God, you have so many notes for everyone at Harvard.” She starts touching his hair again, and pulls him down on the bed so they’re laying together.

“Yeah, well. It’s not like I’m _writing_ them, really. You know how it goes.” Impressions, mostly, recorded with facial recognition apps.

She stops touching him actively. “Some of these are kind of fucked up Mark. ‘Stuck up sorority bitches’ has its own folder?”

Mark was not prepared for this. Erica’s personal notes on people are mean, too, but in a personal way, like ‘drop a class if you have to do a group project with her.’

“Why do you hate the swim team?”

“They’re just broad shouldered douchebags.” Mark smells fresh snow as he keeps sifting through her, visualization flipping around until he sees himself and no, nope, shit.

“‘Okay for now?’” she says, sitting up and staring at him through her Glasses. “That’s what you have me listed as? ‘Okay for now, the sex is great?’”

“Don’t just --” Mark winces as she yanks the plug out of his head, grinding noises reverbing through his jawbone.

“Get out,” she says, throwing the cable at him as he leaves.

\--

They make it to one more date, where she tells him he’s a terrible conversationalist and an asshole, which Mark knows is true.

So when Erica dumps him, no one is that surprised. Mark starts writing the blog on the bus home, and then code, and by the time he’s back in Kirkland he’s just trying to figure out the right way to do it.

Eduardo’s in his bed but Dustin’s at his desk, and he almost kicks them out

“You don’t look as smug as you usually do,” Dustin says, and hands Mark his beer.

“Dumped.”

Eduardo looks at him with sad, sad eyes, and Mark says, “Fuck her anyway.”  
“I’ve got a new site ready, but I need to figure out how to rate people against each other. Like, who’s hotter, Erica or a cow?”

Eduardo makes a face but Dustin goes, “Way to diss yourself there.”

“No farm animals?”

“Maybe just like, which person is hotter?” Eduardo says. “I’ve got...hold on.” He pulls a real, paper index card out of his bag and writes something on it in neat handwriting.

Mark takes it and tries to remember the last time he wrote something with a pen. “Is this a rating system?”

“Well, it’s the logic for one, mostly. I mean, you’d obviously want to know which cow is the hottest and best rated one of them all, right?”

Mark grins. It’s not a very nice one.

\--

The next morning is painful because after launching a quick and dirty site, FaceMash, they all got exceedingly drunk, and drank more when Chris showed up after having struck out.

“Oh shit,” Mark says when he’s woken up by an urgent message alert, and he stumbles into the main room.

They all blink at each other -- Eduardo out on the couch where he passed out, Dustin trying to shove cereal in his mouth, Chris shirtless in the kitchen.

Mark reads a very stern email out loud.

“So you crashed the servers?” Dustin asks.

“Yeah.”

“And they might expel you?” Chris doesn’t look impressed, but he might just be trying not to laugh.

“They probably won’t, though.”

“They could,” Eduardo says, voice gravelly. 

Mark shrugs. “They probably won’t,” he repeats.

Dustin buys him ice cream and kicks his ass on the new Oculus shooter.

Mark spends the waiting time fixing his code, and powering through a bunch of homework he’d been putting off, and generally not seeing anyone after the flutter of sociability. It’s hard to focus for a while -- he feels scraped up and raw inside his own head for a few days. He resorts to doing work in Eduardo’s room, making him explain economic principles to him as he studies. His voice is soothing, grounding, and Mark has no idea what the fuck he’s talking about.

He gets another stern email and a hearing time, and he drops off the grid for a couple days to figure out his school disciplinary issues.

\--

Mark Zuckerberg is not expelled.

Instead, he gets a cascade of hatemail and one job offer.

\--

“Some guys want me to make them a dating site for Harvard students,” Mark says. He’s called Eduardo this time, which is less weird than it should be.

Eduardo is someplace with a lot of wind. There’s a bench near his dorm where he’ll sneak cigarettes when he’s really stressed, and Mark guesses he hasn’t seen Eduardo for a while with the whole almost-getting-expelled thing happening. 

“Yeah?” Eduardo is saying and Mark clicks his tongue.

“Yeah. I said I would, but I think I could do something better, you know?”

“That’s good, because I don’t know if your dating experience is going to make a useful website.”

“Cold, Wardo, cold.”

“I only speak the truth,” he says, and there’s a stiffness in his words.

“You sound stressed.” 

“I’m surprised you noticed.” 

“Dude.” Mark pauses, imagines Eduardo’s expression, and wonders for a second if he could code a gallery to pop up based on tone of voice. May as well video chat at that point. “Have you...eaten dinner?”

“No. Chris and I have been studying together in the library. I’m just sick of graphs right now.”

“Whatever. Come home and we’ll get a pizza and smoke up.”

He can hear Eduardo saying something, muffled.

“Give us two hours. Chris says don’t smoke his weed without him.”

-

Dustin wins at Mario Kart this time and celebrates by doing a dance with elaborate hip gyrations, Eduardo laughs so hard he falls over, and Chris falls asleep in a chair.

“Time for bed,” Mark says, tugging on Eduardo’s arm, and wonders if this is how Eduardo feels all the time, warm and protective in his chest.

-

Mark wakes up with his nose buried in Eduardo’s neck and realizes this probably is pretty gay, and maybe he should just go with it.

Eduardo is hot, temperature-wise, all the time, and he’s got his undershirt rucked up because Mark has his hands on his stomach. It’s flat, defined but not rock hard. His body is lean, a runner, a swimmer. 

He smells nice, almost always, but he smells kind of like Mark’s detergent, too, which is weirdly comforting. Mark realizes he’s only been asleep an hour and is still high 

“Hey,” he says to the back of Eduardo’s head.

“Hum?” Eduardo murmurs, shifting, and Mark can feel his muscles under his palm. 

“You’re hot,” Mark says, not smooth at all, wondering if he should look up some instructions. His rig is in hibernate mode, no help at all.

Eduardo huffs a laugh, nervous probably. “I’m not sure what you mean?”

“You know everyone thinks we’re fucking?”

Eduardo stills under Mark’s hand, mumbles “Então, shit, I haven’t been sleeping here nearly as much lately, but I can stop. Eu sinto muito, okay?”

Mark shakes his head, realizes this might not be the time. Eduardo’s talking fast and the Portuguese means he’s not even awake yet, might not even remember in the morning.

“No, hey,” he says, trying to be soothing, “don’t worry about it. You’re fine, we’re fine.” He murmurs it a few more times til he can feel Eduardo relax, and then listens to him fall asleep.

 

\--

“Your room looks like a ghost lives here, Wardo,” Mark says when he shows up to his dorm. Dustin has his girlfriend over and Chris has a couple loud friends over to do some group project. “You ever even seen a picture frame?”

Eduardo shrugs, looking up from the book he was reading. “I like to keep it down to the essentials.”

“Are you planning on moving somewhere soon? Do you have some Mafia deals we should be worried about if you start funding this new site?”

“Uh, nothing you’d need to be worried about, not really. I mean, I’m not on any kidnapping lists right now.”

Mark throws down his bag and settles onto Eduardo’s bed. “Right now?”

“Currently not at risk,” Eduardo says.

“Does that mean you were once at risk of being kidnapped?” Eduardo can see his eyes tracking something on his Glasses; probably googling ‘Saverin’ and ‘kidnapping,’ maybe even doing it in Portuguese.

“I’ve been at risk a few times, off and on. It’s not a big deal, really.”

Mark’s mouth opens and shuts and he stares for a second. “I don’t know how they do it in Brazil but it’s kind of a big deal here. Like, you’ve gotten those Boston missing kid blasts in your email, right?”

“When I was a kid, it didn’t seem like it could happen to me, and that it’d be like a movie or something. Like in Hook when they get taken by pirates? It’s scary for them but also a big adventure?”

Mark is still looking at something, but his eyes are hard when he looks into 

“It was kind of a surprise when it happened. I thought it only happened to exceptional children, who’d be worthwhile to ransom. Prodigies.”

“Weren’t you a chess prodigy?” Eduardo realizes he isn’t quite sure what Mark could dig up on his life with that setup, with his disregard for boundaries, and it makes him nervous.

“People only care about computer chess masters now, not seven years olds.” Eduardo tries to laugh it off. He couldn’t play in the advanced neural leagues, anyway, just him and a bunch of older, non-wired people in the traditional tournaments.

“Wardo,” Mark says, as gently as he probably can, and Eduardo wants the floor of his dorm room to swallow him.

“Look, it was fine. I knew what to do, just in case. It took a little longer than usual to retrieve me since I don’t have a tracking chip or anything and it took them a little while to figure out I couldn’t call out for help.”

It was fine. He was just handcuffed to a wooden chair, snatched on a walk home from school.  
It was not like Hook. The smell was dank, the colors muted, and the men would grumble to themselves about whether he was armed. “He’s just a kid,” one of them grunted, and he was allowed to go to the bathroom a mere 10 hours after arriving.

Eduardo can tell Mark’s display is off from the incredulous expression on his face. “You’re fucking with me, right?”

“My dad was pretty happy to have an excuse to move to the States. Don’t worry about it.”

Mark gnaws on one of his fingers, biting at his cuticle skin. Eduardo resists the urge to smack it out of his mouth.

“Wardo, you’d let me know if I needed to worry about it, right?”

“You don’t have to worry about anything,” he says, “unless you get really really rich soon.”

Eduardo desperately needs to change the subject or he’ll die of mortification, but Mark beats him there.

“So speaking of getting really rich...I’m going to need a CFO for this web project.”

Eduardo gives him a sidelong glance. “You mean The Facebook needs funding.”

Mark shrugs. “Yeah. We’re gonna need our own servers, for one.”

“Let’s start with ten grand,” Eduardo says, and Mark beams.

\--

“So you stole the idea of two dudes on the crew team, and now you’re just gonna dick them over?” Dustin is smiling but he sounds legitimately concerned. 

“I’m making my own thing,” Mark says, “and I’m dicking them over.”

“Aren’t those guys going to like, crush your puny head?” Dustin asks. His fingers are twitching and his eyes staring ahead, totally plugged in, but he’s still able to talk.

Eduardo can’t understand how they can focus on so many things at once. He can barely study when the TV is on, which is why he’s never bought one for his own room even though his Glasses barely pick up the broadcast feed and show things at the size of a postage stamp anyway.

“Whatever. I’m too good to waste on what they’re planning.”

“You’re gonna poison yourself,” Chris says, and Eduardo realizes his stylus is shoved in his mouth. Disgusting habit, his dad used to say.

“It’s just a stylus,” Eduardo says, feeling himself blush a little.

“So you’re really gonna fund this?” Chris asks him, letting Mark’s and Dustin’s conversation fall to the background.

“Yeah. It’s a good idea, right? I mean, the paper face books are out of fashion but having an online school directory on with a real UI and network, instead of the university’s, sounds like it’ll be a hit.”

“So is it like, your family’s money?” Chris is clearly trying to sound casual and not insulting so Eduardo will let it slide, just this once.

“No, _actually_ ,” he says, leaning forward, and Chris actually winces. “I made it betting on oil futures, based mostly on weather pattern predictions.”

“Wait,” Dustin says, suddenly tuning in, “we’re getting funded by weather predictions?”

“It’s ‘we’re’ now?” asks Mark and Dustin sticks out his tongue.

“Yeah, yeah, I’m in, Zuck. How could I refuse after the success of FaceMash? But I want to hear about Eduardo’s Weather Channel fortunes.”

“It’s just predictive modeling? I’ve got a couple programs set up to archive data and then run it every so often, if I want to invest.”

“Shit, dude.” Dustin isn’t looking at him but he sounds impressed.

“So you’re all in now, then?” asks Mark. “Funding, comms, and code?”

Chris nods. “Is this where we all put our hand in a circle and shout ‘Go Team?’”

“I didn’t play team sports,” says Mark.

“That’s pretty obvious,” says Dustin. “Your parents should have done more to socialize you.”

“I’ll be plenty socialized over the holidays,” Mark says, flopping onto the couch and rolling his eyes.

“I’m sure your family will be excited to see you,” Eduardo says mildly. 

“You says that like your family won’t be,” Chris says, “and you’re still chewing on that stylus.”

“Jesus. They’re fine. It’s just a long flight.”

“Yeah, but at least it’ll be warm in Florida. Those suckers are gonna freeze,” says Dustin, finally looking up. “Also, we should get dinner to celebrate since no one wants to do a team circle.”

\--

Eduardo comes back to Harvard after Christmas with a spectacular bruise on his zygomatic arch. He doesn’t say anything about it when he steps into the Kirkland suite, six-pack of bottled beer in hand, so Mark doesn’t say anything at first, either.

Mark peers at it, though, at first wondering if he’s imagining it, then because he wants to touch it. He wants to press against all of Eduardo’s scars and a bruise, it seems, is no different. He wonders if the skin there feels different, like the smooth feeling of the scars behind his ears. Mark touches them sometimes when he’s drunk and Eduardo sighs soft when he does.

“I got in a fight with my dad,” he says, finally. They’ve moved on to the cans of PBR in the fridge, and Mark almost breathes out a sigh of relief except wait, what.

“And he punched you?” Mark doesn’t really get it. Eduardo seems well-adjusted enough, even though he’s essentially naked in a world moving triple his speed. He doesn’t seem like he comes from a “troubled home life.”

Eduardo shrugs. “More of a slap. A hit. A punch would be more of a black eye all over.” He waves his hands in front of his face vaguely. “We were both pretty startled.”

“You hit him back?”

Eduardo stares at him. “I. What. No, of course not.”

“But he hit you. In the face.”

“He told me I shouldn’t be doing business where I’m sleeping, and I told him that was ridiculous -- it was a high risk venture, sure, but even if I wanted to, you weren’t going to get into bed with me, hardly anyone would want to, especially you, I mean we can’t even plug--”

“But I do want to,” Mark says, cutting him off, and Eduardo looks at him, eyes wide and then narrowing suspiciously.

“Mark. Don’t say things you don’t mean.”

Mark swallows, then kisses him.

It’s clumsy -- the angle’s no good and they’re both drunk and fuzzing at the edges, but Mark thinks he gets his point across.

“You’re so old-fashioned,” Mark says and Eduardo touches his own lips.

“This is probably a bad idea,” Eduardo says, and Mark almost wants to make him model it out, let him know exactly how bad it is. Draw a flow chart.

“No,” Mark says, and that’s that.

-

When they get naked, Mark keeps squinting at him, running his hands over smooth skin but pressing where it isn’t smooth. 

His scars aren’t stark but they’re there, lines that have tanned over. Summers spent with the lingering stripes right above his swimsuit, a few on the back of his thigh.

Mark touches them.

“Jellyfish sting,” he says when Mark touches his hip, and “Bike accident,” about the one on his knee, “that’s from when Pai decided la chancla wasn’t enough,” about the few light stripes on his ass and thighs.

“What.” Mark looks at him and then stares into his eye array.

“Are you Googling chancla?” Eduardo says, grabbing Mark’s wrist and moving his hand back to his hips.

“Obviously.”

“Don’t worry about it,” Eduardo says, “I doubt you’ve got much experience with it.” He smiles, like he’s thinking of getting beaten in some kind of fond way, and it freaks Mark out.

He touches the jellyfish scar again, and Eduardo kisses him.

“Can you stop multitasking for a little while?” he asks, touching Mark softly on the face, running his long fingers down his jaw and then resting his hand on Mark’s bare chest.

Mark closes the browser and looks at Eduardo, framed by his rig and smiling. If he wasn’t so analogue, Eduardo would be so far out of his league. He’s hot. 

Mark gets on top of him, kisses him and each kiss he gets is better than the one before it. Eduardo is a kissing master, all slow tongue and hot mouth, and he rests a hand on the back of Mark’s neck. His other hand slides down to his erection and Mark bucks into his hand, gasping into his mouth.

It’s not a tentative grip -- Eduardo is confident and Mark isn’t going to last long, not with how Eduardo can play him like an instrument.

Eduardo bites a little at his bottom lip and twists his wrist and Mark feels the spark go up his spine before he comes. He tries not to just be a dead weight on Eduardo’s sticky chest, but it’s difficult. Eduardo’s hard, hips jerking up a little, and Mark rolls off of him.

He bites at Eduardo’s smooth shoulder and returns the favor, Eduardo hot in his hand. Watching him arch up when Mark jacks him off is sort of exquisite and Mark thinks that he’ll need to tape this sometime, needs to capture the moment when Eduardo’s eyes flutter shut and he comes.

-

Mark is running his hands over Eduardo’s back again. Not every pock mark has been accounted for, but he still likes how Eduardo feels. It’s different than just the visual stimuli he’s used to.

“I still don’t get why he hit you.”

“What, you never yelled at your mom or dad?”

“I think my parents maybe put a little more thought and effort into alternative disciplinary techniques,” Mark says to Eduardo’s back.

He huffs a laugh, face still half pressed into the pillow. “What,” he says, reaching back to run long fingers over his side, the backs of his hip, “you don’t think this was work?”

-

Dustin kicks open the door and stops dead in the doorway. Mark’s sitting, slumped against the couch, with Eduardo’s head in his lap. He’s carding his fingers through Eduardo’s hair and the TV is on.

After a pause, he shakes his head and yells, “You owe me $50, Hughes,” over his shoulder. “Told you all they needed was some alone time.” He waggles his eyebrows and Chris laughs, coming up behind him.

“What, did someone in a bar besmirch Mark’s honor and you had to defend him?” asks Dustin after he puts away his luggage. He leans over the side of the couch and waves a hand at his face.

Eduardo laughs and says, “Something like that.”

“Why Mark, I never would have guessed that chivalry would be the way to your heart,” Dustin says.

Chris glances over at the kitchen. “I think it was mostly the beer.” The recycle bin is full of bottles and cans.

“How’s The Facebook going?” Chris asks

“All business, that’s cold, Hughes,” Dustin says from their room, door open. “Especially now that love is finally in the air.”

“Good,” Mark says, even though just hearing ‘The Facebook’ makes him feel little pricks of panic. He’s been fucking around with Eduardo instead of coding, and he should have been doing both.

\--

“It’s just not a big deal,” Eduardo mumbles into Mark’s neck. The bruise is almost gone, but Mark presses on it anyway, during sex in the morning, when he tilts Eduardo’s head for a kiss. They’ve only fucked a couple times since that first time, Mark disappearing into code and resurfacing only barely.

“Would you hit your kids?” It’s not very good bedroom talk, but Mark isn’t a bullshitter.

His eyebrows jump. “I don’t. No, probably not.”

“There.”

Eduardo sighs, pulling out of Mark’s grip. “Look, I know you and the guys think I’m some kind of super exotic Brazilian, the lack of hardware thing aside, but I’m American in a lot of ways my parents aren’t. You...you wouldn’t get it, okay?”

“Are you saying only _Americans_ don’t hit their kids?”

“No! I’m just. I don’t know what I’m saying anymore, okay, but I’d like you to drop it.”

Mark runs his hand over Eduardo’s hip, over the scar that’s taken the longest to disappear under the sun. He wonders if Eduardo cried. Sometimes he wonders if Eduardo would let Mark hit him, but he pushes that thought out of the way. He doesn’t want to hurt Eduardo, not really, but he wants to mark him somehow. It would be something totally alien, maybe.

He thinks Eduardo would let him.

What Mark really wants, more than anything else, is to plug into him. He wants to be as fully inside Eduardo as he can, bodies and minds slipping over one another, a stream of endless facts about him as close as he needs them. Just thinking about it makes him ache.

He moves his hand up Eduardo’s chest and to his neck, lays a thumb over his pulse point and feels his blood move for a minute. He bites at it, scraping his teeth over the clear skin, then kisses him sloppily.

Eduardo seems happy for the conversation to be over, sucking at Mark’s lower lip and moaning when Mark shifts above him, rubbing against his dick.

"I want," Mark says, panting into Eduardo's ear as he thrusts against his stomach. "I want to plug in.”

Eduardo shivers all over, but he frowns, too.

"I can't," Eduardo says, and Mark moves his hand up Eduardo's chest, sliding up til it's behind his ear. The skin there is always red hot, inflamed, and he presses against it.

Eduardo whines like when Mark teases him with his fingers, high and overwhelmed.

“I know, I want to though, I want to be in you completely.”

“I’m sorry,” Eduardo says, panting and Mark kisses him, shutting him up. Eduardo doesn’t understand -- couldn’t -- but that doesn’t mean Mark can stop wanting every part of him.

\--

Mark could spend literal days hunched over a keyboard, no visual stimuli except what he got beamed straight into his eyeballs, Eduardo thinks. It’s sort of spooky, that single-minded focus on Facebook when he’s used to Mark talking, coding, eating, and sometimes playing video games poorly all at once.

He gets it, though,maybe. And it’s important to Mark, and sounds like a good idea, so he leaves for class in the mornings without whining that he wakes up alone, and he listens to Dustin bitch about servers even though that’s not really something he gets.

“These two are probably going to die sitting just like this,” Chris says, drinking a beer and staring at Mark and Dustin on the couch. Dustins fingers flit in the air and Mark’s keyboard clacks rhythmically. Eduardo was kind of kidding himself by showing up, but at least he brought them orange juice so no one will die of scurvy.

“It’s probable,” Eduardo says. 

“Does you think the site has too much blue?” Chris asks as they watch The Facebook being completed.

“Mark is colorblind, so probably. But I guess that makes the interface accessible.”

“Huh. I thought the neural optical array would compensate.”

“I’m not an expert here,” Eduardo says. “But no, it doesn’t appear to.”

“Weird. Don’t get me wrong, I think people are going to love it. But I think sometimes people are a little too plugged in.”

Eduardo shrugs. “It’s the way of the future. Is that why you don’t have an optical neural array?”

Chris snorts. “No, it’s more because that shit is dangerous. You could go blind or have a stroke or whatever. But you see more and more kids here getting them anyway.”

“Do you,” Eduardo says, trying to tread carefully, “think it’s going to be a requirement soon? Like, expected?””

Chris thinks on it, and then shrugs. “Probably. It already kind of is for rich kids, right?”

“Yeah.”

“Which is a whole different problem. Schools teaching to neural technology and schools where no one even has a basic rig.” He takes a long drink.

“I got a free period in high school because of that.”

“Huh.” Chris looks at him, face soft. “I wouldn’t worry about it too much, Wardo. Once this goes big no one can tell you shit, right?”

Eduardo laughs. “It’s true. The first unplugged tech mogul in decades.”

\--

Eduardo _gets_ Facebook. It’s a directory -- a database -- but for everybody at Harvard. You can check in with your friends, tell people where you are, get notes from people in your class like with CourseMatch. It’s everything else that it can do that feels too big.

“The possibilities once we get enough users are huge,” Mark says. He’s coding in Eduardo’s room again, taking up the bed and clicking on his keyboard. Eduardo doesn’t let himself study in bed, so it works out.

“What else can you do with a university profile?”

Mark doesn’t huff in exasperation, doesn’t even change his tone. Eduardo appreciates it whenever there’s lack of condescension in his words.

“That’s just the _start_ though. It’s a profile, but it’ll be a stationary point for you on the flat web. Instead of signing in everywhere, or needing a bioscan to read the Wall Street Journal or whatever, you’ve got Facebook. It knows who you are so everything else won’t have to.”

“So it is a flat web project?” Eduardo wondered before if Facebook was even something he’d be able to use, even as he handed over the money.

“Again, it is right now,” Mark says. He actually shifts view, from direct to overlay, to look at Eduardo. It’s almost guilty. “The dynamic web is different, right? There’s a whole different aspect with neural -- your biometrics, but that’s still replicable on dumb tech. This is going to be _you_ , online.”

“But Synapse was dynamic, right? It was a neural web project.”

“Well it wasn’t to begin with. First it was just sort of algorithms, predictive pattern matching. But yes, the final version was a pretty basic smart web app -- it took your biomeasurements into account, like if you were running or something. But I’d been writing it to respond to moods, to be thought-searchable, you could hum something and it’d pop up. Not all of it was published, but.”

Eduardo nods. “And Facebook?”

“It’s going to do so much more.” Mark grins.

\--  
The actual launch is pretty quiet -- they’re in Kirkland and Mark just decides, that’s it, it’s ready. 

“I put in some dynamic features -- should just do a bioscan for login purposes, but there’s a flat web option too,” he says, and then pushes it live.

They all feel giddy, looking at each other, and Chris and Eduardo email it out to their respective clubs and organizations. 

Mark keeps the analytics on, watching in real time as people check it out, start building their profiles, uploading avatars. Two people add each other as friends in the first fifteen minutes and they all high five, and go to bed jittery on potential success.

\--

A few days later Dustin and Chris throw a huge party, and even Billy and his girlfriend show up in Kirkland. Dustin’s current lady friend, from three floors up, is in the room, and so are a couple other movie night regulars. Eduardo’s brought over a couple Investment Club members, one member of their board, and a couple friends from his study group. People from their pledge class bring a keg.

“Okay,” Chris says, tablet in hand. “Wardo and I are sending the second round of emails out now.”

“You can watch the sign ups live,” Dustin instructs, pointing at the TVV.

Mark has the site up, a tablet hooked to their TV so it’s a huge screen showing the numbers of visitors, people on the site live, and other stats.

Everyone does a shot when the number of users rolls over to 150 and Eduardo and Mark both look at each other.

“Just kiss already” Dustin texts to Mark and Mark snorts, but he squeezes Eduardo’s hand.

“It’s happening,” Mark says.

“You did it,” Eduardo says, and smiles.

\--

Mark turns FaceMash into a study tool for Art History and Facebook is stretches all around campus, hundreds of undergrads all inputting their schedules and their favorite media and a flattering photo and really, Mark didn’t expect it to be quite this good.

It feels good, though, when a girl touches his shoulder for a little too long at a party or when a jock he’d normally hate tells him it’s a dope site. No one he knows in passing has called him a dick for like a month.

He smiles back because he can, and wonders if he should expand to Yale.

\--

“Are we dating?” Eduardo asks. 

It throws him off his game completely. They sleep together, semi-regularly, although Mark has been busy and wired in and maybe it’s not as regular as he thought.

He thinks about what he did with Erica -- that was dating. What he’s doing with Eduardo is decidedly not that.

So he says, “No?” almost on instinct.

Eduardo’s face falls for a second, but it returns to neutral after a shaky breath.

“Okay. Because this girl asked me on a date and she seems pretty great. I was thinking of saying yes, but like. Obviously you’re my priority, right?”

Mark opens a browser window and thinks ‘polyamory’ into it instead of answering.

“Uh, okay. So.it’s cool if I go?”

Mark shrugs and says, “I don’t really care,” and he isn’t sure why that is what he says.

“Okay.” Eduardo bites his lip. “I mean, I don’t have to.”

Polyamory looks exhausting, like it requires a lot of talking and negotiating and that will cut into his time for Facebook, and his time fucking Eduardo. 

Mark thinks he has his priorities straight, and he shrugs. “You can do whatever you want.”

“I think you’ll like her? She has family out on the West Coast and told me she knows a bunch of tech people.”

Mark is suddenly very interested in continuing this conversation rather than ignoring it ever happened. “Yeah? Does she use The Facebook?”

Eduardo nods. “Yeah. She told me the other day to ‘facebook her’ We’ve been officially verbed, Mark.”

“I know.” Mark feels the warm buzz of praise under his skin and wonders if he blushes when Wardo compliments him. He’s not shy in his admiration so that could be inconvenient.

“Find out who she knows, okay?” he asks, and Eduardo nods, but doesn’t really smile. 

\--

The launch to other schools goes great, even if Eduardo appears to be a) dicking around with finals clubs, like those are a thing that matter when you’ve got 3,000 users, and b) actually dating someone who isn’t him.

“Is...Eduardo cheating on you?” Chris asks him one day when they’re both in the kitchen and Mark stiffens.

“We’re not dating,” he says after a second. “So, no.”

“You’re a dick and a liar, Zuckerberg,” yells Dustin from the living room and Mark flips him off.

“Oookay. Well, that seems pretty dumb,” Chris says, “but I guess you guys can just keep on living the denial life.”

“Christy knows Sean Parker,” Mark says. Blurts, really.

“Wait, what?” calls Dustin, and Mark moves back into the room, sandwich in hand.

“Napster Sean Parker.”

“Fuck, dude. You’re an evil genius, and I like it.” Dustin gives him a high five and Chris rolls his eyes.

“You’re making him date someone for networking connections?”

Mark scowls. “I’m not making him do anything. She asked him out and he said yes. I’m fine with it.”

“You sound really fine with it,” Chris says and Mark flips him off, too.

“Whatever, Hughes. Come talk to me when you fuck the same guy for more than a month.

Chris throws his hands at his chest. “Ouch, that burns,” he cries, then laughs. “Dude, it’s college. I’m having fun.”

“And I’m also having fun,” Mark says, mouth full, “so mind your own business. Or, better yet, mind my actual business and answer some Facebook emails.”

\--

Sean Parker is cool.

He looks like how a thousand programmers _thought_ they would look once biomechanical implants became possible -- Molly Millions glasses, just enough leather and gleaming metal in his suit to make him look like he could be in a post-apocalyptic gang, or was just into edgy fashion. He’s trim, blonde, white flashing teeth. Unprofessional. Has probably never worn a tie.

Eduardo's jaw is clenched when he walks in, but he smiles graciously enough when Sean offers him a handshake.

"It's great to meet you," Eduardo says, “It means a lot that you’ve taken the time to check out our product.”

Sean Parker waves his hand dismissively. "Always happy to pop into meatspace to meet with a fellow visionary," he says, clapping Mark on the back like they've been friends for years.

Mark is already buzzing with his energy.

Eduardo bumps his shoulder into Christy's but she just shoots him a sidelong glance. It’s her referral that got them this meeting and she warned them pretty clearly to “not fuck up and don’t make me look like a dweeb, asshole.” Well, she warned Mark.

-

They're on after-dinner drinks when Sean Parker pulls a cable out of his pocket and says, "I think this meeting will be more productive if we go straight to the source.” He waves the end at Eduardo and says, “I’ve got a splitter if you want in on this too.”

Eduardo shakes his head and tries to catch Mark’s eyes without looking too panicked. Mark just shrugs. 

“No, that’s alright,” he says, clenching his hands into fists under the table.

“Look, I promise I use protection,” Sean says, and this gets a scoff from Christy. “My firewalls and shit are all up to date.”

“I don’t --” he starts, and Sean rolls his eyes.

"C'mon, man, I know even you have to have a jack." Sean leans further over the table and flicks Eduardo behind the ear. The touching shakes Mark a little -- he thinks of the pink skin there as private, and he doesn’t like that.

"I don't. I mean, I don't do that," Eduardo stutters. He's flushing, red from alcohol and that shame that Mark knows he carries, that Sean can probably see.

Mark can’t believe he didn’t think this through.

Sean Parker carefully hinges his polarized glasses down his nose and stares. His fucking eyes are even augmented, which is overkill -- you can get stuff patched straight to the optic nerve, you don't need a little robot in the actual eye. But his contacts whirr a little and focus.

"You don't _do that_?" he asks slowly, making air quotes with one hand.

Mark flushes at that, making them match.

"No." Eduardo swallows hard.

"Well, I hope you don't mind that Mark and I are going ‘do that’ for a little bit."

Christy full-on sighs, her breath making her bangs flutter. She's slumped back, enough appletinis that she must be sugar-crashing, so at least Eduardo won’t feel too alone -- it's rude, after all, to patch in at a restaurant, to be running all your systems when you're out with people at all. And Eduardo gets it -- Mark can be plugged in at all times, so he is, but this is taking it another step.

"Can you get another round of drinks first?" Christy asks, leaning forward and forcing a smile. 

Sean’s eyes flick between her and Eduardo before they slide down her neckline and he laughs. "Wouldn't want you two to get bored," and he summons a waitress.

Eduardo can't look away when Sean Parker cradles Mark's head to slip the plug into his jack, sliding his hand over Mark's jaw.

Christy finally looks at Eduardo when Marks eyelids flutter shut. "Gross," she says. Her jacks are much more discrete, fake skin flaps, nothing about her would let anyone know she was augmented at all. It's how Eduardo knows she comes from the same wealthy background he does -- none of Eduardo's cousins would be caught dead with a rig like Dustin or Mark's. 

“Can they hear us?” she asks, sipping at her drink, and Eduardo shrugs.

“Depends if they want to. Mark...usually can.”

“Mmm.”

“Sean probably doesn’t give a fuck,” he adds.

“You’re not missing much,” she says, “although I guess I’ve never plugged in directly to someone with that much hardware.”

Eduardo looks at her, a little scandalized.

“My girlfriends and I used to do it for shits and giggles in high school, c’mon. It’s not a huge deal.”

“I don’t really have the frame of reference,” Eduardo says and feels something heavy in his chest.

“Do you think he’ll pay for dessert?” she asks, “because I’m ordering.”

-

Back in the hotel, Christy passes out in the bed immediately, but Mark is up on the pullout couch, hands fluttering in the air

"Hey," Eduardo says when he gets out of the bathroom, teeth brushed and in just boxers and an undershirt. "Hey." He presses on Mark's shoulder and Mark jerks.

"What?" he says, almost a snarl, and Eduardo steps back.

“Uh. I just wanted to say, dropping the ‘the.’ You’re right. It’s cooler that way.”

Mark squints at him, inscrutable. 

"You should sit up straighter," Eduardo says, and he presses his knuckles on either side of the base of Mark’s neck.

"Fuck off," Mark says but it ends in a groan as Eduardo switches to his thumbs, digging into the knotted muscle there.

“You’ll be a hunchback by age 30,” Eduardo says, and Mark sighs softly.

“I’ll be a millionaire by then. I’ll have servants who can do this for me,” he manages to say as Eduardo moves his hands down Mark’s biceps, which he didn’t even know were so tight. Who ever thinks of an upper arm massage? But it feels amazing.

Eduardo’s scarred fingers are like magic and Mark falls asleep easy that night, thinking of Facebook, how it’s going to be in the future when every person in the world can login to something he made.

\-- 

Eduardo has had sex. Probably more than was advisable as a high schooler, when he was rich and doe-eyed and way more desperate to get out of his skin, jumpy and closeted for a couple years. He didn’t need to be any of those things in a club, drunk

Sex with Mark is...okay. No, it’s good, it’s pretty good, when it’s happening it can be great. It’s the after that isn’t, when Mark immediately goes back to whatever’s on his screen, shuts Eduardo out. Maybe never stopped working.

Sometimes he thinks fucking is just a checkbox on Mark’s to-do list -- something he has to do, not something he wants. He feels this way even though Mark usually initiates, unless Eduardo’s drunk -- he’s still horrible as asking for what he wants. He might still be afraid of Mark saying no.  
-

Eduardo is curled on Mark’s bed, working on a problem set on his tablet, when Mark shifts and moves over to him. 

“Hey,” Eduardo says, looking, up, and Mark looks stiff. Then Mark leans over and kisses him.

“Oh,” Eduardo says when Mark pulls away, wiping his mouth.

“I want to spank you,” Mark says. His voice is a little hoarse.

He’s been spanked before, but no one had ever asked. Mostly it came with some remark about him being eager. And sometimes he liked that, the degrading feeling curling in his stomach mixing with shocky pleasure at being hit on the ass.

He doesn’t think he can take that kind of derision from Mark.

“I...why?” Eduardo shifts uneasily. It could be good, he thinks, but.

“I think you’d like it,” Mark says, shrugging. “I mean, I know I’d like it.”

Eduardo stretches and then looks at Mark, squints. “Are you watching porn right now?”

That doesn’t get him flustered at all. “It’s boring trying to be nice and let you do homework. I bet that problem set isn’t due for like, two weeks.”

Eduardo wants to be horrified but he’s mostly intrigued -- Mark sitting there, thinking about him but watching porn as some kind of perverted courtesy. Thinking about him.

Thinking about _spanking_ him.

“How long have you wanted to do this?” Eduardo asks, putting his tablet safely in the drawer by Mark’s bed.

Mark bites his lip and Eduardo can tell he’s shutting down the direct-eye displays. It makes something tingle in his spine -- Mark has been working on not doing anything else during sex, and while it hasn’t been 100% successful it has been _better_. A lot better.

“A while,” he says. “Since January, really.”

“Wait, this isn’t some kind of...you’re not doing some kind of daddy-issue thing with me are you?”

Mark looks confused for a second, then horrified. “No, no, this isn’t. No.”

“Okay.”

It takes a minute for Mark to stop coming up with arguments in his head. “Okay. Roll over then.”

“What, that’s it? No foreplay?”

Mark frowns. “I could blow you?” he offers after a pause, and maybe Eduardo doesn’t need too much foreplay because that’s got him plenty interested, plenty fast.

“Yeah, uh, that’d be. Good.”

Mark kneels down by the bed and works at Eduardo’s slacks, yanking them open.

“Just get naked,” he says, impatient, and Eduardo’s dick jumps

Mark has a hot mouth but he’s lazy, likes getting blowjobs but is indelicate giving them unless he’s really trying. Here, he tries.

Eduardo’s toes curl in the shitty dorm carpet until Mark pulls off, giving his dick a couple slick tugs and standing up.

He feels languid, and Mark rolls him over, shoves some pillow under his hips.

“Hmm.”

“What?” Eduardo asks.

“You’re too tall.” Mark runs a hand over the curve of Eduardo’s ass. “Try with your feet on the floor, bent over?”

He feels awkward sometimes under Mark’s scrutiny and this is worse, but he tries it and Mark makes an approving noise.

The first hit is loud, and makes Eduardo jump, but it doesn’t really feel like anything more than a loud noise. He grinds his teeth, suddenly nervous. Maybe he does have daddy issues. 

He thinks briefly about his father’s razor strop and then wants to die for thinking of his own father while naked.

The second slap at least knocks him out of his head again.

“I can take it harder,” Eduardo says, and he can hear Mark nod behind him, the whisper of his clothes shifting around. He’s still fully clothed and that makes Eduardo nervous, too, more than the thought of it hurting.

The fifth and sixth hits, though. He lands right on Eduardo’s sit spot, hand flat instead of slightly cupped. The hits are loud but he feels something clench inside, the heat of the pain in his ass moving straight to the base of his dick.

“Oh,” he grunts softly.

“Maybe I should use something else.“ Mark fingers the scar on his hip. “Or we could stop. I don’t know if this is what I wanted.”

“No, it’s fine. I want to try,” Eduardo says. There was a hint there. “I just have tough skin, is all.”

“I could get a belt?” Mark suggests.

Eduardo shakes his head. “No. Just don’t think of me as so fragile, Mark.”

Mark swings again and it’s better -- full palm, and it stings.

Eduardo lets out a loud breath, and says, “Yeah.”

It takes more time than they expected, but Mark gets into it, and Eduardo --

Eduardo feels sensitive, hips jerking into the pillows when Mark slaps him.

Mark stops and runs his blunt nails over both cheeks, raising eight white lines that fade back into the warm red of the skin., and Eduardo moans.

“Ah,” Mark says, and does it again, criss crossing the originals, and Eduardo’s hips shake.

He moans, Mark’s name coming out of his mouth with more accent than he wants.

“I wanna fuck you,” Mark says, pressing one thumb against his hole and smacking him with the other hand.

Eduardo feels scrambled.

“Fuck, yeah, okay.” he pants.

Mark hits him again instead of saying anything, and it hurts but he feels like he’s been hard and dripping forever.

“I’ll start with something harder next time,” Mark is saying as he drops clothing behind himself. “I think you should get up on the bed.”

Eduardo does without thinking, settles with his ass up and his head pillowed on his arms.

“Fuck,” Mark says, and Eduardo closes his eyes and listens to him strip, get up on his bed, and open lube. Everything seems loud, and he feels hypersensitive.

“Wardo,” Mark says, and his voice is scratchy. “You look amazing.” His fingers are cold and not easy, and he starts with two and screws them in. Eduardo can only gasp, that soreness blending with the rest of the pain and he tries to relax and not beg at the same time.

“I can’t believe,” Mark says, adding in a third and making Eduardo ache in a million different ways, “I can’t believe you let me.”

Mark isn’t a tease, but slides against Eduardo's prostate a few times before rolling on a condom and sliding himself inside. Mark’s dick is a tight fit but the kind that manages to knock everything out of Eduardo’s senses away except that fullness, the stretch, the heat, and the push.

“Like, you don’t understand,” Mark says, and he scrapes his nails against Eduardo’s ass again and Eduardo moans, loud, pushing back to meet him. 

His orgasm has been building since Mark slapped him, each hit another ratchet of intensity, so when he comes Mark has barely even touched his dick -- just screwed into him over and over, murmuring compliments and amazement.

“Fuuuck,” Mark groans, slapping him one more time and slumping against Eduardo’s back, coming as Eduardo pants.

“Me fode,” Eduardo murmurs and Mark says, “I think I just did.”

“Ugh, seu merda,” he says and elbows Mark. “Get off.”

“I think I just -” Eduardo kisses him to cut that right off.

\--

Mark plugs in for almost a week straight. He only bothers to show up to the one class he has that takes attendance, and he codes through that too, laboriously thought-typing his way through database matching.

“I think we need interns,” Mark says one night. He’s finished a part of the interface and feels good, but the room around him goes kind of still.

“Mark, you realize those are the first words you’ve said in like 72 hours, right?” Dustin says. He’s holding an XBox controller but Chris isn’t even taking the opportunity to kill him, just staring.

“Eduardo was a little afraid you’d dehydrate yourself and die,” Chris says.

Mark looks down at his desk and there are plenty of empty cans of Mountain Dew. “Doesn’t seem likely.”

“Yeah he brought those by yesterday since you were out of them and we didn’t know for how long.” Dustin shakes his head. “You really gonna let some intern touch your precious code?”

Mark stands up and hears about seven different joints pop. His vision swims for a minute, too. “Unless you wanna be sysadmin forever, yeah.”

“Fuck, no, I’m sick of this server shit already,” Dustin says. On screen, Chris kills him.

“Oh fuck you,” Dustin says, elbowing Chris as he laughs.

“Whatever man, I’m gonna kick your ass. Plug in the Oculus,” he says and Chris gets up off the couch. They don’t play a lot of neural-network games, normally because Eduardo is always around and it’d be rude to do something he can’t see or hear. But it’s fun, way more fun than Mario Kart 64 or whatever dinosaur console Dustin brought from home.

Mark cracks his knuckles and thinks the summer could be like this. He grabs a beer and networks in.

 

\--

Eduardo seems annoyed. That’s new. 

Mark often marvels at how _not_ angry Eduardo seems. When his own keyboard implants rejected, he was furious for months -- at his body for the betrayal, at himself for not being able to will himself through it, at his parents for suggesting it, at the surgeon, at everything. It transformed into a cold fury that propelled his coding into bigger and better heights. Hell, some of his best code is burgeoned into existence by anger.

“Are you still plugged in?” he’s asking, trying to sound like he’s not complaining. He’s spent hours writing up notes for an exam and is sitting in bed, down to just boxer briefs.

“I’m never unplugged. Why?” Mark is curious as to why it’s suddenly a problem.

“At the movies? On a date?”

“I don’t need to give any of that my full attention.”

Eduardo stares. “One, that’s rude. Two, are you coding right now?”

Mark feels something, maybe more flushed than when somebody else called him out.

He sighs, closing SublimeText and shuttering his overlay display, leaving him looking at just Eduardo, sitting in his bed, rumpled and angry. His face is framed by his Glasses and Mark blinks a few times to focus.

“Not _right_ now.” 

Eduardo bites his lip, frowning. “Okay. Okay, sure. What about talking to Sean?”

“I don’t think you understand how much concentration I can give something. You really think you can handle my undivided attention?” Mark’s moving away from the bed now, futzing with something on his desk, so Eduardo props himself up on his elbows.

“Well I’d have to get it first to know, right?”

-  
“What, and you’re never thinking of something else when we’re together? No grocery lists or econ homework or whatever it is you think about? Or when we talk and you have your Glasses on too?”

Eduardo shakes his head. “Not...I mean, sure, sometimes, but not when I’m _with you_ with you. Not when we’re like this. But you’ve always got your optic display on; shit is always spilling straight into your visual cortex.”

“I guess I don’t get to be insulted that you think I do that “

“Yeah, not if you’re actually doing it.”

Mark jerks up. “Aha! I found it.” He’s holding a plastic something, like a chopstick only pointier.

“Aha?”

“It’s hard to shut everything down. I have to finish manually doing it.”

He sticks it in a place behind his ear, where the kill switch might be. The little LED in Mark’s temple dims. He pulls out a tiny screwdriver and turns away for a few minutes, then looks back at Eduardo, face uncovered at last.

“Wow,” he says, because Mark is _staring_ at him in a way no one ever has in his life. It makes him nervous.

“Oh,” he breathes out as Mark stalks to the bed, getting up and straddling Eduardo again. 

The kiss is soft and long, and Eduardo smiles up at Mark as he pulls away. Mark smirks.

“I think you’re gonna be surprised,” Mark says. They kiss for a while and Mark keeps _touching_ him, hand at the back of his head, neck, teeth on his shoulder, fingers running along his hip. He pulls at Eduardo’s nipples and that makes him jerk, every time.

Eduardo tries to give, biting at Marks earlobe and sucking on his neck, but Mark pushes him down on the best and kisses his collarbones. 

“Take these off,” he says into Eduardo’s neck and snaps the band of his underwear, and Eduardo somehow manages to shimmy them off as Mark keeps kissing, keeps sucking on his skin and leaving bruises in his wake. A few pepper his ribs, on next to his nipple, one of the juncture of shoulder to neck.

Mark licks his neck, too, than the side of his armpit which makes him yelp. He didn’t even realize that was somewhere he wanted Mark.

Mark let’s him touch but keeps pulling his hands away, pressing at his scars, at his new bruises, at his bones.

He eventually pulls out the lube, leaning back onto his knees in the V of Eduardo’s legs. “Spread,” he says, firm and fleeting grip on his thigh.

Eduardo feels a little overwhelmed, but he does it, folding his legs and giving Mark room. He always feels a little shame like this, exposed and open and he’s already ready to beg for it.

Mark can see every part of him even though Eduardo will never be able to _know_ all parts of him, and Mark sees him like this, splayed leg and vulnerable. He comes back to it, even.

Stares. Eduardo tries not to tremble and instead leans up, touches Mark’s face where the rig normally does, the soft skin of his cheek and the fragile skin under his eyes. Mark gasps at the first touch, but then leans in, sucks Eduardo’s thumb into his mouth when he slides down to his lips.

“Keep yourself open,” Mark says, voice rough.

Mark starts with one finger and Eduardo breathes heavily, used to less attention here -- they normally start with two. But Mark takes his time, sliding in and out, running his fingertip around the edge of Eduardo’s hole before sliding back in.

By the time he’s up to three fingers Eduardo’s thighs feel sticky with lube and sweat, and his hair is sticking to his face, and he can’t believe how Mark looks at him, how Mark looks when he shoves the fingers of his other hand into his mouth.

Eduardo sucks, curling his tongue, and then he moans because Mark is moving again, slipping into him over and over.

“God, fuck me, please,” he manages when Mark pulls his fingers out.

Mark’s eyes are dark and wide open when he kisses Eduardo and it almost makes him cringe back into the pillows. But he put that expression there and Mark can’t stop touching the hickey’s he’s left on Eduardo’s body.

“You asked nicely,” Mark says, and for a second he fumbles with the condom, sticky fingered and out of control. It’s only a second, though, and then he’s back, crawling into Eduardo’s personal space and filling him up.

Eduardo tries to meet his gaze but almost can’t do anything but get fucked, rocked up against the headboard almost. Mark is driven unlike he’s ever felt -- each stroke is a train slamming into his core, and his dick slides over and over his prostate til he’s gagging to touch his own cock.

“Can I…?” And Mark laughs, curls his own hand around Eduardo’s and they jack him together, Eduardo finally letting his eyes close and head fall back. He can feel Mark staring, still, wonders if he's still thinking about code.

“I’m gonna come,” Eduardo whines, and Mark doesn’t stop until he does, and keeps fucking him after. His hands are cradling his hips now, and Eduardo is jerking, jittery, his body overheated. Mark’s still on him, still fucking, and Eduardo moans because his whole body is wrapped up in what Mark wants, what Mark is doing, Mark staring at him and scratching him and fucking him.

Eduardo almost barely notices when Mark makes him come a second time because he’s full of sensory overload, Mark just touching him, kissing him, pulling his nipples, and driving into him. He speeds up and up and up and Eduardo almost chokes on it, feeling Mark’s dick that deep and when Mark comes Eduardo can feel it shake his whole body, too.

\--

Mark does find it easier to sink into sleep with Eduardo around, his hands in his hair or rubbing softly at his back after taking away his keyboard. He wonders if this was a different utility of Eduardo’s, something he could provide that Dustin and Chris couldn’t.

Something he’s claiming for himself.

\--

The morning after is slow -- they kiss even though Eduardo normally hates that before they brush their teeth.

“I can’t go to Palo Alto with you this summer,” Eduardo says as Mark pulls on a pair of jeans from the floor.

Mark doesn’t still, but his jaw goes tight, and when he’s dressed he stares hard at Eduardo. It’s weird seeing his whole face.

“What, did you find something more important to do with your time?”

Eduardo swallows. He should have gotten dressed too, he thinks -- he’s at a disadvantage, undressed in Mark’s bed.

“I got the internship at Lehman.”

Mark keeps scowling, turning away to start putting his rig back on.

“I didn’t think I’d get it,” Eduardo says, which is only a half-lie, and, “I applied before Facebook even happened,” which is the whole truth.

“This isn’t about Christy, is it?” Mark isn’t facing him, is doing something on his desk with a small screwdriver and his face.

“No. She is going to New York, too, but. Mark, you know that’s not why I’m going.”

“Yeah, okay. Whatever.” He looks over, rig firmly in place over his eyes, and Eduardo sighs.

“Look. I _earned_ this. What am I gonna do for you in California that I can’t do in New York.”

“Do I need to state the obvious one, Wardo?” Mark gestures an open hand at the bed, and Eduardo can feel his cheeks heat up.

“It’s just three months. I’ll visit.”

“You can’t prioritize Facebook like that,” and Eduardo wonders if Mark wants to be his priority. But last night was an exception, a total aberration. Mark can’t keep that up, and Eduardo can’t expect him to.

“You don’t,” and he almost says “don’t prioritize me,” but says, “You don’t need me to,” instead.

Mark huffs. “I want you to.”

“It’ll be fine.”

“I gotta get to class,” Mark says, and leaves.

\--

The Kirkland dorm is pretty visitor-free for a while. 

“Look are you still trying to freeze Wardo out?” asks Dustin on their third Eduardo-free day.

“I’m not going for the whole time and I’m not even bankrolling you,” Chris says.

“But you’re like, our PR. You can do that anywhere. Wardo’s the CFO.”

“Yeah, I guess,” says Chris.

“I think you’re jealous,” Dustin says, “and I need a beer for this.” He heads to the kitchen and comes back with two beers as Mark gets his indignant sputters out of his system.

“What am I jealous of? The Phoenix?”

“Christyyyy,” Dustin says, and Chris nods.

“Oh yeah. Christy, for sure. She’ll be in New York too, right?”

“Why are you so pissed about it, anyway? It’s not like he’s cheating on me.”

“It’s not like he’s not sleeping with someone else!” 

“Yeah but you’re the one who said it wasn’t exclusive, right?

“I didn’t know that meant turning into his piece on the side,” Mark says.

“Piece on the side?” Chris asks at the same time Dustin says, “Fucking other people is kind of what happens in an open relationship, buddy.”

“And she introduced you to Sean Parker.”

“That is a bonus of your boyfriend’s girlfriend.”

“I need him there, okay?” Mark snaps.

“You probably should have told him that a little earlier,” Chris says, not unkindly.

\--

**Palo Alto**

The house is nice, but they start working immediately, Sean hovering around to make sure things go right.

“What do you mean, he doesn’t _have_ a jack.” Sean doesn’t make it a question, more like a flat statement of disbelief.

Chris shrugs and glances at Dustin, whose mouth thins. Blow up imminent, but they weren’t sure whose it would be.

“It’s not like he didn’t try to get them,” Mark says, voice matter a fact, “His body just rejected the implants.” He doesn’t even look up at Sean from the tablet he’s drawing wireframes on. There are few neural networks strong enough for direct image transfers.

Chris and Dustin do a complicated series of micro expressions at each other and Chris almost grins. 

“It’s not that uncommon, Parker,” Chris says. 

“It’s pretty uncommon for a CFO of a tech start-up, yeah. No wonder he’s such a joke.”

The entire room stills.

“I need you to be quiet for a while,” Mark says and Dustin is honestly disappointed.

\--

“I want to take it off the flat web, but it’s going to cost more than whatever advertising offers you get are ever gonna be.”

“Have you ever started a phone conversation with ‘hello’ or ‘how are you’?” Eduardo has a tension headache behind his eyes -- the firm has terrible monitors and his was still covered in dust when it was delivered to his desk. But without the neural hookups, using Glass as his primary screen is just too slow and limited.

“I’m not trying to waste your time, Wardo, like you seem to be wasting mine by looking for advertising.”

Eduardo sighs. “What’s your new idea.”

“Expansion to the neural web.”

“The neural web is even less sustainable as a funding source, so unless you plan is to live off all those donations Sean Parker has rolling in,” he coughs, “then you’d better have something else to back it up.”

“There’s so much possibility there, and you can’t even see it.” Mark’s voice turned ugly. “You’ll never even be able to use it, so I guess I can’t expect you to know how to sell it.”

There’s a long pause in the conversation. Eduardo waits, maybe, for an apology, but he knows it isn’t coming.

“I’m not sorry that I’m right, Wardo.”

“Okay.”

“I need you out here,” Mark says.

“I doubt that more with each conversation we have.”

“Just see what you can do?” His voice is pleading now, a hint of a whine.

Eduardo books a flight. Mark knows exactly how to use him, knows what buttons to press to make him work the right way.

\--

Eduardo is cold. He’s soaking wet because no one is answering the doorbell. He can hear music blasting from inside the house, the house that he’s paying for, so he knows it’s not empty.

No one is answering their phone either. They weren’t answering when he landed, when he got his luggage, or when he got into a taxi, so he’s not surprised.

Eduardo thinks about whether or not he can jimmy the lock open with one of his ID cards, or his ancient credit card. 

“Mark!”

It swings open, but it’s Sean Parker, not Mark, on the other side.

“Hey Eduardo! The party’s going strong, you’re just in time!” Sean’s eyes are hidden behind his polarized optic array but Eduardo isn’t too dumb to know the smile is completely fake. He bares his teeth in a return smile and drags his suitcase in behind him.

“Mark!” He yells, because the music is screaming inside compared to how loud it was outside.

Dustin pops up, materializing from his spot at the beer pong table.

“He’s coding!” Dustin yells, and points upstairs, so that’s where Eduardo goes. 

-

Mark doesn’t look up. Eduardo can honestly barely see him, as the lights are all out in the room, and Mark doesn’t look up even when he turns them on. Full visual cortex load, no outside stimuli coming in. It’s why Sean Parker’s glasses are polarized.

“Mark?” Eduardo tries, but Mark can’t hear him.

He gives up and changes into dry clothes right there. 

\- 

Eduardo comes back downstairs and grabs a beer. He feels like shit and doesn’t know what he’s doing here. He can’t help here -- he doesn’t know what they’re doing and probably can’t even see it.

“Blacked out?” Dustin asks, and Eduardo nods.

“Couldn’t even hear me.”

Dustin taps his jaw. “Probably blocking out all the noise from down here.”

“Well, it would have been nice if his calendar reminded him I was coming.”

“Yeah. Sorry about that buddy; it’s pretty wild around here sometimes.”

“It's pouring, Dustin. Mark said he’d be there.”

Dustin looks apologetic but he shrugs. “It’s Zuck, man.”

Eduardo sneezes and Dustin clucks his tongue. “You don’t really look great, dude. Maybe you should head to bed?”

Eduardo wipes his forehead off. “Yeah, I guess standing in the rain isn’t great for my health.”

“Probably not as bad as living here, though.”

-

Mark takes a break around two am. His bed is empty but he’d seen someone get out of it, a movement he barely saw, code running over his entire span of vision, his fingers hitting keyboard keys only because of ingrained muscle memory. He walks downstairs and he sees Eduardo shivering in the kitchen getting a glass of water.

Eduardo’s still shivering when he meets Mark back in his room.

“What’s wrong with you? Are you cold?” Mark vaguely thinks he should be touching Eduardo’s forehead but he’s not sure if it would be a welcome gesture. Besides, his own biometrics are easy to read, just pop something into a slot on his wrist and all the intricacies of his health are there for the taking. Eduardo’s vitals are a mystery.

“I think I caught a cold from being out in the rain all night,” he says, but there’s no bite left in his voice. It should have been a barb but Eduardo just sounds defeated.

“Why would you do that?” Mark asks.

Eduardo just looks at him, even more hangdog than before. “I’m sick,” he says.

“You think…? What...what do we do?”

“What, haven’t you ever been sick?”

Mark shakes his head. “Not really. Not since I started college, anyway.”

“Jesus Christ. Of course not.”

Mark picks up the comforter and slides into the big bed, and Eduardo starts and stares at him.

“Shared body heat could help with your temperature regulation?” Mark says and Eduardo says, “God can you not...read websites at me right now, please?”

“You’re also not going to help me with those fucking ice cold feet,” he hisses and Mark pulls the comforter up around the two of them.

“I’m still mad at you,” he grumbles as Mark keeps touching him, running his hands down Eduardo’s back, thumbing all the places that are warmer and familiar.

“I wish I knew what you were thinking,” Mark says

“I’ll start updating my facebook,” he says, and Mark tries thumbing at the base of Eduardo’s neck, what Eduardo does to him when he doesn’t move enough.

Eduardo groans loudly and he keeps at it, working the muscles there until they’re pliable, pets Eduardo’s hair and rubs his back until he’s soft and not shivering at all.

Mark likes leaving bruises -- hickeys on his collarbone, a shadow of his grip on Eduardo’s wrist. Eduardo doesn’t have any now, no lingering remnants of Mark anywhere on him.

“Your skin’s just so...” Mark says to Eduardo’s back. Mark’s is littered with old surgical scars, from upgrades and hardware replacements, skin bulging and stretched over metal.

“Hot. I feel hot all over,” he says, panting a little. 

He was going to say clean.

\--

Eduardo looks bleary eyed the next morning, but his fever appears to be broken.

\--

Mark wonders the next day, not for the first time, what it must be like to be trapped inside yourself all the time. Eduardo spends the afternoon drinking tea and trailing Dustin, who grins wide and explains everything about their day-to-day in teeth-grindingly specific detail. Eduardo takes notes, typing things one-handed into a tablet. 

Dustin asked him why he wasn’t doing this and Mark grunted, said he had real work to do, and watched Eduardo’s face falter. It felt...something, maybe Eduardo’s been gone for a while, and Mark can only be himself.

Sean Parker shows up to party. He’s got coke, which makes Eduardo raise his eyebrows and the interns trip over themselves to be cool. Chris isn’t there to keep it from happening, out doing something else that Sean probably told him to do. 

Mark imagines Wardo and Sean fighting and just says, “Don’t,” to Wardo when he sensing it about to happen.

He watches the interns do shots and then watches Eduardo talk to Dustin outside. Eduardo’s smoking, and Sean pops up behind Mark to watch too.

“I guess his body isn’t a temple, then,” Sean says, miming inhaling. “That stuff’ll kill you.”

“What are you talking about?” Mark snaps.

“I thought maybe it was some kind of religious weirdo thing, since he hasn’t got,” and he gestures around his face, “but I guess he’s just not into it.”

“He can’t,” Mark says, “the implants won’t take. He’s _tried_.” Mark stares at Eduardo’s hands, silhouetted by the porch light.

“Dude. That sucks, but why is he even here then?”

“He’s the CFO.”

“Look, would you draft someone without a left arm to your non-cyborg baseball team? He might be good, but he’ll never be the best.”

“I don’t like sports.” It’s an automatic response, and Sean laughs.

“Just think about it, okay buddy?” Sean claps him on the back.

“Think about _what_?” he asks, but he knows. Has already thought about it. Has already wondered about the Facebook Wardo can’t even see.

\--

Mark wakes up early, hungover as fuck, but he can’t get back to sleep in his now-empty bed. Squinting, he makes out that it’s nine am. Where the fuck would Wardo be if not asleep?

He slithers down the stairs and finds a couple interns sprawled on the couches there, and Dustin asleep at the kitchen table with a laptop and some empties. Mark fixes a bowl of cereal and wonders if he could eat it in bed or if he’d end up spilling it all over himself, when he notices there’s someone in the pool.

He panics. No one uses the pool -- they’re all too wired and too busy. Theoretically, all Mark’s tech is waterproof, and while that’s definitely true of his internal wiring, he doesn’t quite trust his external jacks.

He shoves the glass door open, startling an intern, and squints out into the sun.

Eduardo flips underwater and emerges, swimming up the edge of the pool where Mark is standing in boxers and a ripped up t-shirt.

“Hey,” he says, and Mark stares.

“Oh, thank fuck,” he finally says at Eduardo’s quizzical face. “I thought someone drank too much and drowned last night.”

Eduardo just stares for a long moment, looking concerned.

“I’m not a very good swimmer,” Mark says, but he gingerly sits at the edge of the pool, letting his feet dangle in the water. He wonders why it’s so clean. Maybe they pay someone to do that.

Eduardo relaxes, crossing his arms to rest on the lip at the edge of the pool, his torso slick with water and still tan despite a month in New York.

Mark imagines ruffling his wet hair, make it stick out. Instead, he knocks his fist against his own knee.

“Then why do you have a pool?” Eduardo asks it like he already knows the answer.

Mark almost blushes. “Well, uh. Dustin wanted the nicest place we could get.”

“The nicest place my money could buy?” He raises an eyebrow. “I mean, I can picture this discussion perfectly.”

“Yeah.” Mark kicks his feet through the water, heels hitting the tiled wall. “The interns were really impressed.”

“I’ll bet. Did they know they were gonna sleep on the floor?”

Mark frowns. “They could share bedrooms. I think they just sleep where they land.”

Eduardo pushes off from the side of the pool, splashing Mark a little, and floats on his back. “It is a nice place,” he says, and Mark stares at his stomach, the dark hair under his belly button. It feels like they haven’t touched for years.

“Shame about the chimney,” he says.

\--

They have a check-in that afternoon.

Eduardo opens with, “How are you doing search matching? Is it predictive? Is it all connected?” 

Mark blinks.

Eduardo waves his hands. “If you’re not using the Google in-site add-on, which, obviously you shouldn’t, you should still take its best features.

“While there might not be a hundreds of Mark Zuckerbergs, what about John Smith?”

“We just have to get it done,” Mark says. “There’s not time for anything else. If our backend fucks up it’s all over.”

“Search is your biggest feature. And while I’m impressed that you’re figuring out the matching SQL all on your own, you still have to _eat_. Hand it off.”

“Pizza’s a food,” he says defensively. “And I’m great with databases already, fuck off.”

“Dustin’s great with databases.”

“And shouldn’t _you_ be making us food or something,” Mark says, sneering, and Eduardo’s eyebrows shoot straight up into his hairline.

“Okay, wow,” he says, and Mark notices some of the interns looking at them. He glares and they scatter.

“I’m calling time out,” says Chris, finally interjecting. “It’s lunch time.”

-

“So are you just focusing your energy on the neural web side?” Eduardo asks. The interns have all been fed, but Mark is sulking and so he doesn’t get one of the sandwiches that Eduardo had delivered.

Dustin nods. “I think the flat web part is pretty stable -- the servers are fucking finicky but that should be okay for a while.” 

“Plus, accessibility is in the past. Sorry, Eddie, but your kind is dying out.” Sean Parker appears like he lives in doorframes, waiting for the worst moment to pop into a conversation.

“Eddie?” Eduardo draws out the word, eyebrows lifting in disdain more than shock.

“And what happens when the coating on your magnets and circuits dissolves and you get blood poisoning?””

Sean waves his hand. “In ten years? Won’t be a problem.”

“And in order to ensure a lifespan of ten years, maybe you could be a less hellbent on alienating a whole user base. I’m talking about future growth, beyond just colleges.”

“Always about the money with you, huh?”

“When you’re running the whole company on my money, yes.”

Sean leans back in his chair and stares. Then laughs. “Sure.”

“I just think you’ll want a dedicated team for flat web updates. It’s best practice.”

Mark blinks, his hands finally stilling, coming up for air. 

“Did Wardo win?”

“Yup,” Dustin says, not even looking away from his double monitor set up.

“So it’s settled.”

“You listened to me about ads,” Sean says, sounding hurt.

“Ads are stupid,” Mark says. “But Wardo isn’t.”

Eduardo finds himself feeling a little touched. 

-

Dustin looks at him with a manic gleam in his eye. “You really wanna hear about this?”

Eduardo shrugs and settles down on the couch. “Sure.”

“You’re right, Mark shouldn’t be explaining shit to anyone. Remember that time he tried to explain teledildonics?”

Eduardo laughs, and Dustin realizes he’s kind of missed him.

“So, like, you can interact with the flat web interface fine, right?”

Eduardo nods, tapping the Glasses sitting tucked in his shirt pocket. It really was the most disarming thing about Eduardo -- that you could see his whole face at all times. 

“And that’s fine but it’s not dynamic, at least not like the neural web can be. We’re trying to see how to build out that part of the site

“Like, proximity sensors to your friends? Auto biometric updates?”

Dustin shakes his head and waves his hands. “That shit is _basic_. I mean yeah, we’re going to implement it down the line, but I’m talking about the data.”

“Emotive data responses?”

-

Twenty minutes in and Dustin is drawing out an approximate map of emotive data filters, and Eduardo thinks he might get it. “I mean, we won’t be implementing it soon, but it’s better to have the structure in place now then have to deconstruct everything in the future.”

“Forget it, man.” Sean Parker appears, but from where Eduardo isn’t sure. “Eddie here can’t get it.”

“Anyone can get data architecture, Sean, it’s just that this is kind of an innovative move for data visualization."

“No, I mean he can’t _get_ it,” Sean taps Eduardo in the temple and he flinches involuntarily. “Won’t ever be able to look at it.”

“I can use 3D rigs, you know that right?”

Sean leans over the two of them. “But you won’t know what it’s like when the code thinks with you. Sorry, buddy, but Dustin’s innovative new design is lost on you.”

Eduardo sets his jaw and feels shame, mostly. It’s unexpected -- people at Harvard are at least tactful enough to say nothing.

-

The finances meeting isn’t better. 

“Okay, and what happens after the angel investment? When the money that people just _give_ you runs out, how are you going to make more.”

“That’s why you’re looking for ads?” Mark sounds so disdainful it’s like a slap in the face.

“I’m trying to find something that’s sustainable- “

“You’re too busy looking at _past_ revenue models."

“You’re too busy not looking far enough ahead!” 

Eduardo runs his hands through his hair, exasperated and bleary eyed, and Mark stares at him and wonders what the fuck is wrong with him.

“Look, guys, maybe this isn’t the best time,” Chris says, while Dustin says, “Can you guys go fuck it out?” simultaneously.

Eduardo manages a choked laugh. “Yeah, sure. I need to make a call,” he says and goes outside.

Mark rounds at Dustin, but then he just sort of deflates.

“What if we don’t get the investment?” asks Dustin, and Mark pinches the bridge of his nose, blinking hard.

“It’s coming.” Sean Parker hasn’t been wrong yet.

-

“I’m going back to New York,” Eduardo says at dinner.

“Like, when?”

“Like tomorrow.”

“You don’t even care about those assholes.

“What do you know about what I care about, Mark?”

“It’s not Facebook and it shouldn’t be your priority.”

“Would it matter if I did care about it? If you thought I did?

Mark doesn’t pause. “No.”

Eduardo’s face darkens.

“Besides, I know, you’ve got to keep kowtowing to those Phoenix dickheads you work with so they won’t realize you were just a diversity punch.” It’s a low blow and Mark knows it, but he still doesn’t know why else Wardo would be fucking around in New York. It couldn’t even be Christy, who turned out to be a pyro.

There’s a long silence before Eduardo asks, “Excuse me?”

“You heard me,” Marks says, not looking at him. This is not a good way to go out but he knows they’re headed there anyway.

“I don’t think I quite caught it.”

“Take your pick. Brazilian, analog, queer, whatever. I mean, it’s not like being bankrolled by daddy is a standout trait at Harvard and that’s the only other thing you’ve got going for you.”

“It’s funny to hear that kind of disdain from someone wearing about $15,000 worth of gear.”

“My insurance--”

“Fuck that; your insurance did not pay for that stuff in your brain or that visor upgrade. I’ve spent hours looking at this shit, man.”

Mark glares at his dinner even harder. “Don’t you have some place you should be right now? Glee club? Baby’s first investment journal?”

“And it’s not like my daddy’s the one bankrolling _you_ ,” Eduardo says. His voice isn’t steady.

Mark can hear rustling -- Eduardo standing up and swearing softly in Portuguese when he drops something. He doesn’t look up.

Eduardo doesn’t slam the door when he leaves, in fact he says a cheerful goodbye to Dustin and Chris, and that makes Mark even angrier. Even surer, really.

-

The interns are terrible at feeding themselves. There are Cheetos and Doritos bags strewn across the carpet, Mountain Dew cans and bottles of energy shots everywhere. Eduardo was barely there yet the few days he was it seemed so much different. More professional. There were sandwiches and Mark got to argue with someone who wasn’t just listening to him and saying yes. 

Mark feels a little obsessive about it. He lets Sean take him out to a bar, "full of other hot gearheads and cyborgs, c'mon!"

(“Ooh, Sean thinks you're hot," Dustin messages him and Mark scowls).

The music is weird -- there's like four DJs and they're all streaming out, mutely, so all you hear until you hook in is people shuffling and talking. 

"Try stream 3," Sean suggests, and he grabs Mark's arm and takes him to the bar.

Mark twitches, checks out the app that's popped up and makes himself a new patron account.

"I'm out," Sean says, catching the eye of a girl who looks like a catalogue model.

 

Mark doesn't hate stream 3, although he doesn’t recognize most of it.

There's a tall guy out on the dance floor in a striped tank top, dancing. He's got a cute face and fluffy hair, done up like Eduardo does his for a night out.

Mark orders a bomb and chugs it fast, fast enough that the guy next to him buys him another shot and winks.

“Liquid courage,” he yells at Mark, and Mark nods.

He's walking to the beat as it travels through his jawbone, and manages to sort of shimmy his way into the crowd.

"Hey," he says.

The guy looks him over and angles himself better in Mark’s space.

“Who you listening to?” the guy yells.

“Stream 3?”

“Oooh, DJ Boneyard, he’s great.”

Mark turns his music down for a second but it freaks him out, the only sound in the whole dancehall is feet moving and crowd noises and himself breathing.

-

He goes home with Jeff. Jeff has a smart house and has to sign him in as Guest, and he has a full visor display that he starts to unscrew when they get to the bedroom.

"No, leave it on, it's cool," Mark says, touching his face, and the guy smiles.

"Ah, you like that," he says, a little too smug for Mark’s taste, but he goes with it.

It's a little awkward, kissing with two optical displays, and he isn’t as good at it as Eduardo. But it’s not bad. He slides his hand up the guy’s neck and presses against the socket behind his ear.

The guy, Jeff, flushes, and he looks at Mark like he's scandalized for a second. Then he grins. "Oh, so that's what you're into?"

Mark shrugs, but yeah, wow, he's really into it, and he runs his finger over the jack again while kissing.

Jeff moans.

"Do you wanna?" he asks, and pulls out a little USB-to-USB cable. It's high quality, gold wire -- Mark has an identical one in his wallet right next to a condom.

He’s never done this with a total stranger before.

But he wants to, he wants to so bad. It’s different, maybe better than sex, to let someone crawl into part of your head like that. He wonders again, what it would be like if Eduardo could have done this. If he’d finally understand Mark then.

-

It’s not bad. Jeff is reasonably smart, relatively untraumatized, good at sex. Things come to him in stuttering patches of data; he doesn’t know how to do this like Sean does, where it’s an even and liquid exchange of ideas. But he’s never fucked Sean, either.

He sends Jeff feelings -- elation, the snap of victory after shipping something live, the bright feeling of snow in the morning, waking up with Eduardo still next to him.

It’s sexy -- outside of his head he’s hard, and he can feel the hard pressure of Jeff’s thigh against his dick. He fumbles but manages to start jerking him off, uncoordinated with someone else trickling into him. 

The feeling refracts into his head, bursts of light in his eyelids. Kissing is out of the question but Jeff holds his hand, massages it a little, and that rolls around the corners of his head, his own personal database, liquid hot and sexy. 

Jeff likes the ocean and coming is like being pulled under by a wave.

-

“Eduardo must be a pretty lucky guy,” Jeff says in the afterglow. It’s not accusatory -- they both knew this was going to be a one night stand.

“He really isn’t,” Mark says as he fumbles his shirt back on.

-

Mark sleeps okay that night, better than he has since Eduardo left.

\--

“I just don’t think he understands my vision,” Mark says, feeling like a douchebag immediately. The interns are passed out and they’re actually sitting at the kitchen table for once. Chris is gone, too, out of Palo Alto for the rest of the summer.

“He can't see it, Zuck. Like, literally. He’s never gonna be able to, unless biotech advances faster than your code.” Sean grins.

“Yeah, but whose fault is that?” Dustin asks, looking up from his screens. “Isn’t it kinda shitty to use his money to build something he’ll never be able to use?”

Sean shrugs. “It’d be shittier if catering to him held us back from something really revolutionary.”

“Do you think he’s holding us back?” Mark asks, knows the answer and then a notification from the bank appears in his display.

\--

The worst part about the lawsuit is seeing Eduardo’s naked face. He shows up to the depositions without even dumb tech on his face, no smartwatch on his wrist, and barely ever glances at his phone. 

Eduardo sits across the table and Mark can feel the full fucking weight of all of Eduardo’s attention, and it makes him ache in a way he never knew he could.

He thinks about it later, looking through the photos he’s taken over the months he’s known Eduardo, most of them candids.

It breaks so many social contracts -- his camera LED is disabled, and he took the photos without even thinking about asking Eduardo for permission.

But there they are. He’s got a still frame of Eduardo curled in his bed in Palo Alto, skin honey warm and smooth against his white sheets, back long and inviting. He didn’t even realize he was doing it when he took the photo.

He’s got others -- 15 second videos of Eduardo’s face as Mark fucked him, Eduardo studying seriously, photos of him rolling a cigarette and grinning in the snow.

He doesn’t want to add the lawsuit to his gallery but he does -- Eduardo’s face is hard and angry in a way he has no record of.

Sean sends him a photo of himself with girls in bikinis with the message, “Sorry you’re dealing with this buddy, but think of what lies ahead.”

It helps him clench his jaw in return, because he built Facebook with his own hands and he wasn’t going to let anyway try to crumble it down around him.

\--

Facebook stands tall, growing each day. They get gorgeous offices and Mark has employees, and he feels protective and proud whenever he steps into them. 

Once all the depositions are over, though, he thinks he can let loose a little.

The first virus Mark gets freaks everyone the hell out. Dustin calls Chris, who bitches them both out for going out to places recommended by Sean, then bitches Mark out for plugging in with strangers, then panics for a while.

Mark knows they’re judging him and doesn’t give a shit, left eye showing him nothing but snow crashed static. He’s curled up in his house in the master bedroom in a pile of comforter and pillows and trying to drink water.

“...Wardo would know what to do,” he hears Dustin say and just the thought twists in his gut, makes him vomit weakly into the trashcan at the side of his bed.

“Gotta be more careful, Zuck,” Dustin says, coming in with a wet rag that he uses to wipe Mark’s forehead. “What were you even thinking? You gotta update your firewalls every damn day.”

“World’s youngest billionaire can’t have fun?” Mark slurs, and Dustin rubs his back.

“That’s actually me, just so you know, but if your brain fries because of a virus then we’re all pretty fucked.”

Sean appears a few hours later, Chris achieving what a pissed-off Dustin didn’t.

“Got what you need right here,” he says, and slides something into Mark’s ear slot.

It feels weird, crawling through his personal database, like he can feel it under the skin of his forehead. His optical input slowly returns, though, but first it goes through scrambled versions of his personal media, disjointed and pixelated videos and photos of his friends rolling through his consciousness.

“Ugh,” he says as it skips on one of Sean Parker smoking a joint in Palo Alto, then to the Kirkland dorm.

“It’ll be fine,” Sean is saying somewhere outside of him and he finally, blissfully passes out.

\--

“One of the devs is out for a week because she got her boyfriend Sunshined outta her brain and has to reorient,” Dustin tells him over lunch and that’s new.

“Sunshined?”

“Like the movie? Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind? Laura got him wiped. Must have been a bad breakup.”

“Oh.” Mark knew it was possible, but hadn’t met anyone who had actually done it. Brain augmentation beyond cybernetics was a brave new world, and Mark’s own augmented brain was still in recovery mode.

Laura seems fine, though, comes in the next week and does her job and seems, overall, happier. 

\--

It takes him a month, but he finally sends the message to Sean one night after getting shitfaced with his new developers.

“What do you know about Sunshining?”

Sean takes less than a minute to send back, “I know a great clinic, man, don’t even worry about it.”

Chris and Dustin aren’t thrilled but he promises them it’s just the lawsuits, which he can’t stop thinking about. And that’s true -- he wakes up in cold sweats thinking about someone trying to wrench Facebook from his grip.

But it’s also a lie, because sometimes he’ll bring home someone and be struck by how not Eduardo they are, how their hands are smooth, how they don’t make breakfast in the morning. And that is a serious crimp in his life, his plans.

“He’s a flash in the pan of your life,” says Sean sagely as he drive Mark to the clinic, and Mark shrugs.

“I just want to get back into dating,” he says, and Sean nods.

\--  
California, later

Dustin is there because while Mark is mean-funny; he himself is at least just goofy-funny and good at taking the sting out. That’s what Chris says, anyway, and so Dustin makes sure Mark doesn’t insult anyone outright to their face.

He doesn’t know why Eduardo’s there, probably some mutual investment networking thing that Dustin couldn’t give two shits about. He’s a programmer, he doesn’t care about schmoozing unless it gets him laid, or if the event is hosted some place cool, like a zoo.

This event is not someplace cool; it’s currently in a hotel ballroom. There’s probably a speaker or three, and Dustin will end up with his face on ValleyWag being caught sleeping through it.

But Chris asked him to come, and he’s bored. And Eduardo is there. And he looks fine. And Dustin’s drunk.

“Hey, you’ve got something on your face,” Dustin says. It’s a piece of anti-facial recognition tape -- asymmetrical and black, under his left eye.

“Good to see you too, Dustin,” Eduardo says, not even looking over his shoulder. “Excuse me,” he says to the people at his table, and he pushes off and grabs Dustin by the arm and marches him to a more discreet corner.

“It’s a little gauche to show up like that to a tech event if you’re gonna wear a suit, too.” Dustin’s in khakis and a button-up, but there are plenty of Utilikilts and wired wear suits, where the fabric holds a multitude of hardware.

“I’m not the only millionaire here with shit on their face, mine’s just not screwed in.”

“Yeah, but everyone with an optic deck or whatever isn’t also automatically a paranoid weirdo,” Dustin says, because he can’t help himself.

“Well, I’d obscure my features with top of the line hardware instead,” he says, gesturing at his face, “but since we both know I can’t, this’ll have to do.”

“It’s overkill.”

“Only until your CEO sells that facial recognition tech to the highest bidder. The NSA, maybe?”

Dustin doesn’t remember Eduardo saying this kind of shit without smiling. “Mark would never,” he says, probably lying.

“I can recall him saying never about a lot of things,” Eduardo says. He finishes his drink. “The new advertising grids look good, by the way.”

Dustin makes a choked sound in his throat. Slam dunk. He tries to play it off, though. “You’re still hung up on that thing, huh?”

Eduardo laughs, really laughs, tipping his head back, and Dustin grins at him automatically.

“I’m more than rich enough to afford therapy, Dustin. But I’m not above a little ‘I told you so,’ either.”

“I get that. I just wanted to talk, anyway.”

“Okay. Fine. We can talk,” he says, crossing his arms. He looks buffer than he did at Harvard, Dustin thinks. It’s weird.

“We miss you, you know. I mean, not at this stuff, this stuff’s unbearable, but sometimes it’s still weird without you around.”

Eduardo tilts his head to the side. His stare is sharper than it was in college, and Dustin feels pinned to the wall for a second. But he feels ridiculous for even feeling that, this is _Wardo_. He once caught him with Mark’s dick in his mouth.

“Who do you mean by we?”

“Me and Chris. And Zuck, probably. He doesn’t like to talk about his feelings.”

That earns him a raised eyebrow. “I remember.”

Dustin swallows. He isn’t sure where he was going with this -- it seemed like a great idea to get Eduardo’s attention but now that he has it, things don’t seem to be smoothing over. He should have waited for Chris.

He considers opening up a facial expression reading program, mapping out whatever Eduardo’s microexpressions are trying to tell him. He likes using them in these situations, and they almost always force Mark into using them, but this time it feels like cheating.

Plus, Eduardo can read him like a book -- he’d _know_.

“So...how’s life been?” Dustin finally says. 

Eduardo shrugs. “I graduated. I’m thinking of moving to Singapore permanently. I don’t know, what do you want me to say?”

“Are you, like. Are you okay?”

He laughs. It sounds normal. “I’m not dead.”

Dustin frowns. “That’s not okay. Zuck was misery incarnate during the lawsuits but he seems okay now. That’s what I mean.”

“I’m investing in a couple start-up and gambling my life away on the oil futures market, if you listen to my father,” he says, shrugging. “I’m contracted to Lehman Brothers.”

“So same old, then,” Dustin says, a little hesitantly.

“Sure,” Eduardo says. “I joined a chess league.”

“What?” he asks, desperately trying to chat Chris without Eduardo noticing that’s what he’s doing.

“Did you think I’ve spent the past couple years sitting in a dark room, moping?”

Dustin shakes his head vigorously. “No, man, Chris told me you seemed fine at Harvard. Which is weird, ‘cause the last time I saw you, you were fucking pissed.”

The shrug is predictable. 

“What can I say? Sometimes I get personally invested in business. It’s been pointed out as a weakness of mine, in fact.” He takes a drink. “But it’s still just business, in the end.”

It stings more than he was expecting. Dustin thinks about the lawsuit months, Mark bleary-eyed, never unplugging and staying up for days, which was normal. But the way he was sad, and slow, and lonely, and punishing himself for it, that wasn’t.

“Yeah, okay,” he says carefully. “So no hard feelings?”

Eduardo’s eyes, clear and unshielded by a Glass display, go soft just for a second. “Sure. It’s fine. It’s water under the bridge.” He smiles without actually smiling at all.

“Great!” Dustin says, as cheery as he can manage, and claps Eduardo on the shoulder. “How long are you in town for?”

\--

Dustin is annoyed Eduardo didn’t take him up on the offer of sleeping in one of his guest rooms. He’s pretty sure no one has slept in guestroom 3 ever, and it would be nice to break it in.

Plus it means he has to pick Eduardo up from his hotel instead of just leaving at a reasonable hour.

But Eduardo leads him to some part of a warehouse district with tiny restaurants and an honest-to-god diner, not even wearing Glasses, just with directions, and it is definitely worth his time.

The good food doesn’t mean Dustin isn’t going to ruin the meal by bringing up Mark, and he hopes Eduardo knew that when he agreed to grab lunch with him.

“Mark says hi,” Dustin says when they have their food. Eduardo looks skeptical.

“Okay, well he would say hi if he knew you were still in town.”

“He doesn’t?” Eduardo pauses. “Well, if he doesn’t jump on a couple of these app firms I’m talking with, it’s his loss, really.”

Dustin peers at Eduardo through the haze of his facial recognition program, but all it tells him is that Eduardo is feeling ‘guarded,’ which isn’t too much help. It also keeps stalling out because of the same dazzle make-up and tape from the conference, even though there’s no way there’s any kind of surveillance camera where they are.

“I never said I was sorry about the dilution, did I,” Dustin says, and that gets him a ‘shocked’ reading. He probably could have figured that on his own, though -- Eduardo’s eyebrows are up.

“No, you didn’t.” Eduardo bites his lip. “No one has, actually, unless you count Mark putting me back on the masthead.”

“I would definitely count that, dude.”

Eduardo rolls his eyes and Dustin shuts off the program, blinking furiously. He’d forgotten the open plane of Eduardo’s face, the way he just didn’t try to conceal his reactions.

“I mean, we were really pissed at him about it.” Dustin shoves a cheese fry into his mouth and almost moans with how good it is. How dare Eduardo know all the secret dive-y spots in his own city.

“Not mad enough to leave, though, I see.”

Dustin bites the inside of his cheek. “I mean…”

Eduardo laughs. “No, I’m just fucking with you.”

“Thank god, man,” Dustin says. “I can’t hang out with you if you’re just gonna guilt trip me all the time.”

“Then you wouldn’t get cheese fries.”

“I’ve already posted a photo and everyone at the office is super jealous that we’re best friends again, because you know all the best stuff to do.”

“I try to make myself useful.”

“Why is that, anyway?

“Why is what? I like to be helpful?” Eduardo is smirking.

“No, like, why do you know all the secrets of Palo Alto? 

Eduardo chews thoughtfully. “The answer’s the same. Why bother hanging out with me if I can’t contribute anything.”

“Because you’re pretty nice eye candy, for one.”

“It is true that I do have a nice ass.”

“So tell me about Singapore and what that nice ass is doing for you.”

\--

Dustin is an optimist. It makes it easier to jump into risky ideas, to drop out of Harvard, to handle Mark Zuckerberg managing his life for a while. It means it takes him an extra long time to believe Wardo and Mark wouldn’t manage to eventually fix things on their own. He’s feeling peppy this morning, even though he’s friends with incredibly successful fuck-ups.

“Call Wardo,” Dustin says to his rig.

“Eduardo Saverin.” He sounds tinny, and Dustin already has like four upgrades to suggest for his rig.

“Hey Wardo!” he says into the air in the parking lot, walking to the clean and modern offices of Facebook.

“Dustin? What’s up?”

“If you’re not sick of me yet, I was thinking, I mean. We’re all here, right? We should do something big! A party!”

Everyone inside studiously ignores him, because it’s hideously old fashioned to be using a voice call. 

“Is this a trap?” It sounds windy where he is.

“Absolutely,” Dustin says. He waves cheerful at Mark’s assistant, who eyes him suspiciously.

“Fine.”

“Okay, so there’s this amazing paintball place we found.”

“Real or VR? Because you know I’m even worse at virtual reality games than I am at running around in the woods.”

“Real, _obviously_ , what do you take me for?”

“A fiend.”

“Okay, fair.” Dustin waves at Mark, too, who squints suspiciously at him from his office. Dustin likes keeping him on his toes.

“Where do I need to be and when?”

“I’ll be at your place early tomorrow morning.”

He can hear Eduardo’s bitten off sigh and grins to himself again. This is a great plan.

\--

Mark has been on edge since Dustin told him Eduardo was in the country. They overlapped in social circles enough that he was probably going to run into him eventually. 

Mark didn’t hate him anymore, which was a good thing, and he also mostly remember

“Have you seen Eduardo?” he asks Chris at the end of their meeting.

Chris shakes his head. “Dustin’s hanging out with him though,” he says slowly, watching Mark.

“That’s...that’s good. Cool.”

“He might be at paintball tomorrow,” Chris offers and Mark thinks about how long since he’s seen Eduardo in person. He’s always at the stockholders meetings, calling in from wherever the fuck he’s living, mostly far away from Mark.

He’s also always staticky and Dustin always bitches about how he needs to get some better hardware before Chris shushes him.

\--

Dustin picks him up at way-too-early am on Saturday.

“Did you know he’s been learning Português, Wardo?” Dustin mangles it, and Eduardo thinks of him trying to pronounce “Edu” in college. He’s missed Dustin.

“If the next sentence out of your mouth is to tell me he’s started some kind of phone correspondence with my mother or something equally as boundary violating, I’m going to get on a plane to Singapore and never look back.”

Dustin laughs, looking delighted. “No, but I’m definitely putting that on the list of ways to woo back Wardo! Your parents always freaked him out, anyway.”

“My parents? He’s never even met my parents. My father wanted to come up for the lawsuit, but.” Eduardo shrugs, tilting his hand in the air.

Eduardo can tell Dustin is googling his dad, the way his eyes track something no one else can see. It makes him nervous because Dustin is also driving, even if the car is mostly piloting itself.

“Mark always made your dad seem like. Well, like kind of a bad guy.”

“ _Mark_ is pretty well known for his inability to see nuance in relationships.”

“Ouch. I guess that’s fair.” Dustin’s eyebrows pop up. “Hey, though, you’re doing pretty well yourself right now.”

“I’m right here Dustin,” Eduardo says, gripping his mug/seat tight, “You can just ask me about my investments instead of looking them up on some Fortune list or whatever.”

“So what are you investing in?”

“Dumb tech hardware, mostly.”

“Huh. I wouldn’t think there’d be a lot of money in that.”

“There’s still plenty of jobs that don’t require neural hookups. Some even discourage them. Cops, for example. Teachers. Places with privacy concerns. A lot of jobs in the un-unionized labor sector.”

“God, you sound like Chris. You both need to realize you’re part of the moneyed elite class in this country, you know that right?”

“Fuck off, man. Of course I do. That doesn’t mean I don’t know who isn’t.”

“Yeah okay, Senhor First Generation, I’m sure you struggled.”

“Don’t even talk to me about what it is like to be here and not be American.”

“You don’t even have an accent.”

“Yeah,” Eduardo says, slumping a little, “not any more.”

Dustin bites his lip. “I think Chris is gonna join a political campaign. If not that, then He’s definitely gonna to leave us for some “social good” bullshit org soon.”

“Good. He deserves to do something better with his time than cleaning up after Zuckerberg’s fuck ups.”

“Ooh, Zuckerberg now, is it?”

“Dustin. Operation: Two Gay Friends didn’t work in college, Operation: Whatever the fuck you’re planning is probably gonna be a bust as well.”

“That’s not what Chris told me,” Dustin says with barely-constrained glee. “And if I’d’ve known I had three gay friends I would have tried to set you up with Mark instead.”

Eduardo stiffens, but then laughs. “Well, it didn’t work for very long. And you don’t hate me that much, do you Dustin?”

Dustin grins back. “Okay, you’re right, it would’ve still been Chris to start with. But when you two were too polite to get married I would have done it with Mark.”

“We got there eventually.”

“Yeah, never gonna scrub that image of you two canoodling the first time from my brain.”

“I’m glad it’s a cherished memory,” Eduardo says, grinning meanly, “and a little flattered you think of it so often.”

“Fuck off, man,” Dustin says, and laughs. “Before we get there, any chance you’ll wipe that shit off your face?”

“I’ve spent enough time in California to know you’re being tracked constantly. NSA, private drones, traffic cameras. No thanks.”

“What’s your damage, though? You’ve been in enough tabloids that this can’t be new to you.”

Eduardo coughs. “Like that’s not enough of a reason? But if you have to know, it’s because I’m a kidnapping risk. Uh. Again.”

“You’re planning on kidnapping someone? Is it Mark?” Dustin sounds delighted.

“I’m at risk of kidnapping.” Eduardo’s ears are probably pink. “It’s dumb, okay?”

“Your chess club seems pretty cutthroat.”

Eduardo laughs, startled. 

“Does Mark know about this?”

“I guess? I mean, I told him, and I told him he should consider insurance for it when the millions came in. A little polite legal advice.”

“That’s decent of you; I would have expected you to leave him to the pirates as a kind of just desserts kind of thing.”

Eduardo feels his eyebrows snap up and the way his makeup cracks with that much facial movement. 

“Dustin, I’m not a complete bastard.”

“C’mon, you didn’t want to him to get kidnapped just a little?”

He shakes his head. “It’s not as exciting as you’d think.”

The last time Eduardo was kidnapped it was by people who didn’t do their research.

“Oh?” 

“The last time, they wanted everything in cryptocurrency. But it’s not like I could bio ID myself from a concrete basement.”

“You got kidnapped for dogecoins?”

Eduardo grins. “I guess. But you know, again, not biometrics, no wireless transfers for them.”

“How’d you get out?”

Eduardo says, “The insurance came through,” but it’s a lie. 

A man had cut him loose from the chair he’d been in and said, “You got friends watching out for you, I guess.”

He started wearing the dazzle makeup right after.

\--

“Eduardo hates me, why is he coming to this,” Mark says as Chris pretends to drive his own car.

“Probably because Dustin is a menace,” Chris says, tapping the steering wheel as the car turns itself. “And you also asked him to invite him. Maybe he’s got his shit together now.”

“I regret ever asking Dustin for any favor ever." Mark drags a hand over his face. "I fucked up and he fucked up and then we both really fucked up. Is that shit you get together?”

Chris shrugs. “I mean, you seemed to eventually. That last girl you dated, I thought you guys were going to get married.”

Mark shook his head. “No. It probably lasted longer than it should have with Mercedes, to be honest.”

“But you didn’t break up because of Eduardo either. You’ll be fine. It’s fucking paintball.”

“Low stakes, I guess.”

“You might not even see him,” Chris says, and Mark knows that’s a big lie. He won’t be able to stop himself and Chris knows it.

“Sure,” he says instead of calling him out.

\--

Eduardo is bad at paintball.

That he’s worse than Chris, Dustin, and the other Facebook employees isn’t too much of a surprise -- his input goggles aren’t nearly as fast as the one’s they’ve got logged into their neural networks. His are lagging with simple things like target help. 

Eduardo isn’t a great shot but he’s great at getting shot, unable to not laugh and give away his location. His only edge is that he’s fitter than most programmers.

It’s not so bad, until he’s shot in the back. He can feel the burst of paint, can anticipate how bruised his back will be in the immediate haze of shock and pain. He spins around and shoots blind, and hears someone shout.

“Ha!” he yells, vindictive, and sees he’s just hit Mark point blank in the chest. They’ll have matching bruises, then.

“I guess this is kind of a role reversal,” Mark says, staring at his bright blue chest.

Eduardo can’t stop the eyeroll. “Oh, fuck you,” he says, and shoots Mark again in the leg and spins to run. He can hear Mark shout, and a tree next to him gets a trunkful of paint.

He jogs into the underbrush and hears Mark crunching leaves behind him. Mark is in better shape than he was in college, but Eduardo is a runner. That’s the part of paintball he’s best at, and he weaves through trees and over gnarled roots as Mark shoults behind him.

Eventually he turns around and shoots Mark in the other leg.

“Fuck!” Mark yells, foot hitting a root and body crashing into the dirt.

“A little help?” he asks from the ground, and Eduardo laughs.

“Like I’m falling for this sorry trick.”

“No, seriously. I think I twisted my ankle.” Mark is shifting around and Eduardo sighs and gives him a hand.

-

Paintball ends with Mark in the infirmary having a high school student scan and wrap up his ankle.

“Wardo,” Mark says dramatically, and Dustin rolls his eyes. “Can you drive me home?”

Eduardo looks at the small crowd of Facebook employees and finds no savior there.

-

Eduardo is tense in the driver’s seat. Mark’s car is 99% automatic and he hates that he’s played right into Dustin’s hands, but he’s curious.

“So what,” he eventually says, “do you want me to like, absolve you of all this shit?”

“I want to know you forgive me,” Mark says. “It’s not like I’m still mad that you froze the account.”

Eduardo gapes for a second, and then runs his hand through his hair. “Look, I did apologize for that. And I’m not lying when I said I’m past this. But forgiveness? How do I forgive something like...all this?”

“How did you move past it?” Mark’s voice, normally flat, is strained.

“I’ve accepted that I’ll never know why you did half the things you did. That I fucked up too. That the universe doesn’t give too many shits about me.” Eduardo shrugs. “I’m not that special, you’re not going to apologize, life moves on.”

“But I’m _sorry_!” Mark blurts, angry at Eduardo, “I’m apologizing right now.”

Eduardo glares at him, brows furrowed, eyes dark. “I don’t. I don’t want you to lie to me, Mark. I don’t...look, I got a lot of therapy to cope with the fact you weren’t going to ever be really sorry and I don’t need some kind of weird pity now that you’ve grown a conscience.”

“You got a return on your investment.”

Eduardo sighs, “You know it was never about that.”

“Do I?”

“I thought you did. I could always make more money.”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“It was about _you_ , Mark. It always was.”

Mark’s gaze wavers and finally he breaks eye contact with Eduardo, looking every which way. Eduardo goes back to staring at the road.

“I should have known,” Mark says, softly. He sounds more unsure of himself than he did when he entered the conversation, at least.

\--

Eduardo plays chess and can see exactly where he’s headed as he helps Mark into his house, arm slung around his shoulders. He knows it and maybe he just doesn’t care anymore. The feeling is still there under his skin -- it’s part of why he had to get away, far away, to ensure this exact thing didn’t happen.

“I’m still covered in paint,” he says after he closes the door.

Mark stares at him in the entryway.

“Don’t say we could take a shower.”

“Fuck,” Mark says.

“Ugh,” Eduardo says, and kisses him.

-

 

“This was a bad idea,” Eduardo says, mostly to himself. Mark is breathing wetly against his bare chest, optical rig digging into the skin there. He’ll have a bruise. He hasn’t had that bruise for a long time.

He runs his fingers down his neck, and Mark twitches in his sleep like he’s operating a console.

Eduardo makes breakfast because it seems like the decent thing to do. Mark smiles, stupid fond and real, when he gets to the kitchen.

They chit chat, and eat, and Eduardo sighs.

“I can’t do it again. Being in love with you was so much fucking work, but falling out of it? Forget doing that to myself again.”

“What do you mean?” Mark asks it slowly. He looks genuinely stung.

“I worked hard to be over it, Mark.” Eduardo shapes each word deliberately with his mouth and hopes they’re correct.

“Wait, did you get me wiped?” He looks panicked.

“How would I even do that?” Eduardo snaps.

“I tried it out,” he offers, and Eduardo stills, eyes wide.

“Like, temporarily, obviously.” Mark shifts his.weight nervously.”I mean, clearly I remember everything or we wouldn’t. I wouldn’t have.”

Eduardo just tilts his head a little. “Wouldn’t have…?”

“A lot of things. I haven’t even begun to tell you all the things.”

“Why do you still remember me now?”

“Chris and Dustin made me reverse it.”

Eduardo wants to laugh, but honestly still feels horrified. The thought that Mark was so desperate that he’d let someone go into his memories, his drives, and burn Eduardo out.

He can’t say anything and tries to swallow, mouth dry.

“It turns out the voice in my head that reminds me to eat and sleep is you.”

Eduardo feels pleased and horrified in equal measures, his face twitching with deciding what expression to make. “I...what am I supposed to say to that Mark?”

“I mean it turns out that I literally couldn’t live without you.”

“Jesus Cristo,” Eduardo starts, and then a string of insulting Portugese falls out of his mouth.

“Maybe that’s less romantic than I thought.”

“Yeah, wow.” Eduardo can hear his heartbeat in his ears and feel it throb through his body, in his fingertips. “Mark, were we in love?”

“I just thought you fell in love with everybody,” Mark says, and his general demeanor is throwing Eduardo -- he’s more emotional than he wants to be. “Chris, Christy, me, whoever gave you the most attention.”

Eduardo just lets his eyebrows raise, doesn’t even bother to respond because his pulse is still loud.

“I’m not saying you don’t deserve attention,” Mark says, voice rising. “Like, you do, shit. I’m not doing this right.”

“Yeah, that much is obvious.” Eduardo gets up, runs a hand through his hair, wants a cigarette.. “Maybe we’re both too fucked up for this. I can’t believe you had me wiped.”

“I got the reversible treatment!” Mark whines. “I just wanted to stop feeling lonely.”

Eduardo stares.

“I fucked up,” Mark says. “But --”

“Yeah, I fucked up too. I get it.”

“I miss you,” Mark says, and for a second he thinks they’re going to kiss again.

The doorbell rings. “And that would be my ride,” Eduardo says, and leaves. Runs, really.

\--

“He wasn’t exaggerating, at least,” Chris says. They’re sitting in enormous sofas in Dustin’s more than ostentatious house. It’s not even tacky, just overblown, like a magazine spread, with leather and sleek cabinets in the kitchen.

“I mean, he just didn’t eat for like a week,” adds Dustin. “He’d code but he was pretty listless.”

“I’m still pretty horrified, although I guess this explains why he never reached out if he felt this way still.”

Dustin rolls his eyes. “You don’t think it’s romantic?”

“I think it’s kind of fucked up that Mark still can’t care for himself like an adult.” Eduardo runs a hand through his hair, fluffing it further. He needs better nervous tics, he thinks. Maybe he’ll take up e-cigarettes.

“It’s a little sweet, c’mon,” says Chris.

“That I was so good at the care and feeding of Mark Zuckerberg that I imprinted on him? If I wanted a pet I’d get a dog.”

Chris frowns. “Clearly you feel something. We all saw that the chemistry was still there.”

“I know it was,” he says, not sure if his hands are moving enough to convey his distress. “Why do you think I’ve been away for so long?”

“I guess we thought you’d be less angry.”

Eduardo’s head hurts. “Why? This sort of fuck up is exactly what I’ve been trying to avoid.”

“You’ve been waiting for him to apologize, right? Shouldn’t everything be falling into place now?”

“It’s not like you’ve been in any great romances since. Maybe you should give it a shot.”

“I’m glad you’ve been reading my Valleywag pieces.”

“How many times can he apologize?”

“I don’t know why everyone thinks I’m obligated to _accept_.” Eduardo leaves the room, and Dustin slumps down in his chair.

Chris says, “Shit.”

\--

Mark finds him on a beach. It’s a private beach, too, but clearly Eduardo could give two shits and he’s Mark Zuckerberg, who definitely doesn’t give two shits.

Beaches are not great places for people like Mark but he feel prepared to wait in the sun for at least a little while.

“Hey,” Eduardo says presumably looking at him through his sunglasses, and Mark wonders if this is what it’s like to talk to him with his array in full force.

“Hey.”

“That is a ridiculous hat,” he says, and Mark sits down in the detestable sand.

“Not all of us were gifted with the right amount of melanin to prevent immediately burning in the sun.”

They sit like that, watching the water for a while.

“Did you really think paintball was gonna work?”

“We slept together, didn’t we?”

“Just because you’re still attractive,” Eduardo sighs, “doesn’t mean you’re still like, my dream boyfriend.”

“I could be.”

“Mark, at the end there it felt like you barely liked me, like you’d never liked me.”

“Hey, you sued me.”

“Yeah, well. I’m sure as shit not apologizing for that.”

“Fair.”

Eduardo lifts his sunglasses up and peers at Mark. “You could have just called.”

“Dustin acted on his own accord.”

“Tell me you haven’t been mooning this whole time.”

Mark shifts and pulls something out of his pocket.

“I’ve been making this. Well, only in the past year.” He grins, shadowed under his enormous sunhat. “Therapy is a wonder.”

Eduardo takes it in spindly, scarred fingers. “It’s an optic array.”

“It’s a wireless neural plug.”

“Mark, you can’t even hold a soldering iron correctly, what the fuck.”

“Well, I didn’t literally make it with my bare hands.”

“This tech is worth literally billions.”

“And it’s a prototype. It...probably won’t ever be good enough to be commercial.”

Eduardo looks at him expectantly. He never felt this flustered talking about Facebook. 

“But it’ll run the features of Facebook, the dynamic web side, for you.”

Eduardo stares at it.

“It won’t do much else but that’s what I have.” Mark puts his hands on his knees and thinks this might be the time to retreat.

“I’m going to actually kiss you this time.”

“Okay,” Mark says, but he’s not prepared to be knocked over into the sand.

“You should have led with this,” Eduardo says. “I’m really bad at paint ball.”

\--

Mark sends Dustin a photo of Eduardo asleep the next morning and receives five thousand Facebook thumbs up for his trouble.

**Author's Note:**

> The title is from a Pinback song, Proceed to Memory, that maybe had more to do with this story when I started it.


End file.
